Whether it be eating fast food, viewing pornography or even the language we use – all our actions are contributing to culture. More and more we are almost unconsciously buying into cultures without giving thought to the ramifications.
My work at the moment is focused on exploring the visual and linguistic culture around how we perceive the female body. Using a process of gathering contemporary images and words that describe female genitalia, I give to the viewer a chance to reflect on a representation of the bits and pieces that are coming together to influence this subject. If work is seen as confronting it is because the attitude we have toward the female body is confronting.
This is why I thought it to be important as an artist and a woman to illuminate this issue and hopefully stimulate discussion and change.
“We cannot separate the representation of women in cultural images from the
social construction of gender and sexual difference.”
– Rosalind Coward
Modernism was based on a series of master narratives inherited from the Enlightenment defining beliefs, philosophies and ideologies. These dictated history and science as well as the rational, singular subject where the masculine was the status quo. These master narratives have remained in the social unconscious through representation and visual imagery. In the 1970s and 1980s Postmodernism lead to an interest in theories of representation creating an awareness of how images work to influence us: “not in order to transcend representation, but in order to expose that system of power that authorises certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others.”1 This enabled the deconstruction of the singular masculine subject and birth of the fragmented, pluralist Postmodern subject.
Feminists used these theories to analyse the representation of the feminine in our two biggest visual mediums: art and the media. In a violent backlash to entrenched ideology, the previously repressed ‘other’ was given a voice. Femininity can be understood as a “social process in which the female sex is attributed with specific qualities and characteristics”2 creating a framework of desirable and acceptable behaviours and relationships for women. Challenging the subordination of the feminine reveals the root of patriarchal intentions: to maintain the fixed nature of masculine identity via its representation of the feminine. As Rosemary Betterton states; “The female image is omnipresent in modern capitalist culture.”3 We are saturated with images of femininity, creating a discourse of what it is to be feminine affecting both men and women. These expectations are defined and reinforced through the way the female body is perceived and represented and has been explored by artists Judy Chicago and Barbara Kruger.
Women have not been absent in art history. However their overwhelming presence has been through the representation of the feminine; particularly in the tradition of the female nude where women are portrayed as delicate, submissive subjects available to and moulded by the male gaze. Veiled in the ‘High Art’ contexts of mythology and religion the female body was “governed by rigid codes pertaining to the representation of sexual difference”4 such as “…the elimination of body hair and the suppression of the vagina…”5 in accordance to desire, patriarchal ideology and cultural convention. This form of absence and suppression of women has long been the subject of critique by artist Judy Chicago.
Born in America in 1939, Chicago’s practice has been heavily influenced by the Feminist Movement and theories. Her works address not only gender relations but also the repositioning of the boundaries between ‘High Art’ and ‘craft’. In her infamous Dinner Party, Chicago uses traditionally “feminine” skills such as china painting and embroidery to subvert and undermine the absence and misrepresentation of women throughout history. This piece was a collaborative multimedia installation which has had international impact on art and culture. From her consideration that “art objects are ultimately the most significant transmitters of a culture’s values”6 Chicago set out to create a new historical record – not the exclusive history outlined by the Master Narratives but an inclusive one which protests the oppression of women by honouring their achievements.
The installation consists of a triangular banquet table complete with 39 individual and unique place settings on which china plates and embroidered runners lie, positioned on a “heritage floor” where 999 women’s names are inscribed. The work was made when women’s history was largely unknown so Chicago undertook an enormous amount of historical research to select thirty-nine mythological and historical women of outstanding social contribution and pioneering efforts. The decorative styles and motifs typical of the period in which each woman existed were used on their place settings that also acted with a visual context. In a Postmodern strategy the work utilises “feminine” crafts and places them into the ‘High Art’ context of a gallery in order to challenge the relationship between them in a juxtaposition.
Each plate and runner is distinct but all the place settings are identical – signifying the individuality of each woman and their achievements while unifying them through their gender. The place settings also act as a dual metaphor “both domestic and religious, expressing the ‘containment’ imposed by female role expectations…and the indispensable through unacknowledged ‘women’s work.’”7 This reveals Chicago’s intention: “to teach women’s history through a work of art…and to break the cycle of history.”8 This history was one where the achievements of women were ephemeral and written out of historic record. Chicago evidences this in the ways the names on the heritage floor are obscured when walking around the table. By undertaking this enormous project which was completed over five years Judy Chicago has visually written a new history; a history of women. Ultimately, the artist also challenges the pervasive definitions of women and female sexuality as passive, showing them as active subjects through their achievements. This is also evident in the sexual imagery of the work, carried on from earlier pieces in Chicago’s oeuvre.
The china plates in The Dinner Party display a fusion of vulval and butterfly motifs to create a “metaphor for an assertive female identity.”9 Many viewers found this imagery challenging, considering art history’s traditional “suppression of the vagina.”10 Situating the pudenda on the dinner plates also acts as an association with how women’s achievements have been “consumed” and hence erased throughout history. Confronted with something that is taboo displayed on such a controllable and intimate surface such as a dinner plate triggered squeamish reactions from some spectators, particularly men. This discomfort is rooted in the spectator’s psychology and can be related to Freud’s theory of castration anxiety. This occurs when upon seeing the mother does not have a phallus, the male subject becomes fearful his own genitalia will be cut off. To allay this anxiety the fear is displaced onto an object (usually inanimate) such as women’s high heels, which forms what we know as fetish – at once disavowing knowledge while memorializing the moment of realisation. By having the feminine on display as active and autonomous the artist challenges the fixed nature of masculine identity. Hence The Dinner Party accesses the collective psyche to challenge the representation of the feminine in art and the absence of women in history. Using common tools of visual language, Barbara Kruger also questions the representation of the feminine in another visual medium: the media.
In Post-WWII capitalist culture, advertising has become a “form of communication in which we all have a share, whether we choose to or not.”11 The cultural invasiveness of advertising saturates us with constructed images of women as well as constructed differences between men and women. This creates what Goffman refers to as “commercial realism”12 Advertisements represent already familiar values and attitudes, which appear to be true through creating a specific subject position for the spectator. The images of advertising propagate what appear to be naturally ‘given’ meanings “by linking products to images, values and beliefs which already have social currency.”13 By deconstructing the way advertising influences us, its ideological production can be revealed and critiqued. This technique is utilised by the artist and graphic designer Barbara Kruger.
Known as a “crossover artist,”14 Kruger uses her experience as a graphic designer in combination with a fine art practice to create works that focus on “stereotypes, clichés and categories as manifestations of power and control.”15 Her concepts include analysing the way the media makes our choices for us by revealing exactly how these images convey assumed values of dominant aesthetic discourses. She achieves this by staging the techniques “whereby the stereotype produces subjection,” but for the intention of inciting to the viewer to reject this address. This “contradictory construction”16 is present in her photomontages of the 1980s, where Kruger superimposed text onto pre-existing images.
Inspired by reductive Modernist design, Constructivist graphic design and Dada typography, Kruger’s photomontages “exemplifies the continuum of activist designers who, since the Nineteenth Century have used the tools of mass communications to subvert the myths perpetuated by the powerful.”17 This can be seen in her work Untitled (you are not yourself).
We see a shattered mirror reflecting the partially now fragmented face of a crying young woman gazing into her own image, her tears gathering in a pool on one of the shards of glass. We recognise her as a woman through visual signs of femininity commonly seen in advertisements; manicured and painted fingernails, lipstick, mascara and plucked eyebrows. The female subject is either in the motion of taking a shard of glass out of the cracked mirror, or vainly trying to put it back together. This is reflective of the fragmented identity of the female subject in reality, torn between the distorted constructed expectations of her gender and who she really is. This is further emphasised by the epicenter of the shatter being positioned at the center of her forehead – an allusion to the brain and sense of self. Superimposed onto this complex image are the words “You are not yourself.” Jagged and uneven, these letters look as though they were physically cut from magazine or newspaper pages and pasted on to the image. Kruger uses a play on words in the visual presentation of the text, the “not” appearing notably smaller than the rest of the text, inverted to white on black creating the line “You are yourself” if one only casually observed the work. The single red box around the black and white image is also there to remind the viewer of the context to which these techniques belongs: the advertisement.
In this way, Kruger reveals to the audience the power of advertising; to ease its way into our homes and subconscious, presenting us with images subtly loaded with ideological expectations; the modern viewer is unaware of its impact if not attentive. The meaning of the work is situated between the text and image, demanding interpretation from the audience who places the framework of dominant ideology on it to be persuaded by the artist to reject it. Hence, Kruger “tapped into universal graphic expression that gave the public ready access to her ideas”18 creating a contemporary, universal visual language by appropriating advertising techniques to analyse the media’s representation of the feminine.
The violent overtones in Untitled (you are not yourself) are present in the majority of Kruger’s work, relating to the violence of the male gaze and its construction and control of femininity. Concurrently, the fragmented image of the woman’s reflection is relative to the way female sexuality is displayed in the media. Cropping in on the sexual elements of the female form such as eyes, lips, hair, breasts and buttocks, female sexuality is formed based on patriarchal visual expectations and are synonymous with the commodity. When women comply with these expectations, they appear perfect so when men view them, they can “reassure the apprehension of lack”19 that comes with castration anxiety. Evidently, we can see that inherently “the fixed nature of masculine identity is, then, an effect of disavowal, a fantasy…”20 necessitating subordination: femininity.
The works of Judy Chicago and Barbara Kruger disrupt the visual economy in which the fixed nature of masculine identity exists through its control and representation of femininity by challenging the subordination of the feminine. As a result these artists have “explored not only what we see…but also how we see – the invisible operations that produce the seemingly natural spaces of image and viewer and, in so doing, challenged notions of visual purity at their core”21 in the forms of art and the media. Chicago and Kruger have given the audience the tools to identify the ideological powers at work in society, however the possibility of dramatic change in the way we perceive and represent the feminine is yet to be seen.
References:
1 Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, p. 168
2 Rosemary Betterton, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, London; New York: Pandora, 1987, p. 7
3 op. cit p. 1
4 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a project of Historical Salvage’, Photography at the Dock, , University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 233
5 ibid.
6 Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, New York, Penguin, 1996, p. 34
7 ibid. p. 60
8 op. cit. p. 7
9 ibid. p. 40
10 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, p. 233
11 Rosemary Betterton, p. 19
12 E. Goffman, Gender Advertisements, London, Macmillan, 1979, p. 45
13 Rosemary Betterton, p. 22
14 David Deitcher “Barbara Kruger: Resisting Arrest”, Artforum 29, no. 6, February 1991, p. 84
15 Ann Goldstein “Bring in the world” in Barbara Kruger, Thinking of you, London, MIT Press, 1999 p. 25
16 ibid. p. 36
17 Steven Heller, “Barbara Kruger, graphic designer?” in Barbara Kruger, Thinking of you MIT Press, 1999, p. 89
18 ibid. p. 112
19 Rosalyn Deutsche “Breaking Ground: Barbara Kruger’s Spatial Practice” in Barbara Kruger, Thinking of you, MIT Press, 1999, p. 82
20 ibid. p. 83
21 ibid.
Bibliography:
Books
Betterton, Rosemary, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, London; New York: Pandora, 1987.
Goffman, E., Gender Advertisements, London, Macmillan, 1979.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a project of Historical Salvage’,Photography at the Dock, University of Minnesota Press, 1991,
Owens, Craig, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992.
Articles
Deitcher, David, “Barbara Kruger: Resisting Arrest”, Artforum 29, no. 6, February 1991, p. 84
Deutsche, Rosalyn, “Breaking Ground: Barbara Kruger’s Spatial Practice” in Barbara Kruger, Thinking of you, MIT Press, 1999, p. 82
Goldstein, Ann, “Bring in the world” in Barbara Kruger, Thinking of you, London, MIT Press, 1999 p. 25
Heller, Steven, “Barbara Kruger, graphic designer?” in Barbara Kruger, Thinking of you MIT Press, 1999, p. 89
