An Intimate Distance

Women, Artists and the Body

Rosemary Betterton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136155697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

An Intimate Distance considers a wide range of visual images of women in the context of current debates which centre around the body, including reproductive science, questions of ageing and death and the concept of 'body horror' in relation to food, consumption and sex. A feminist reclamation of these images suggests how the permeable boundaries between the female body and technology, nature and culture are being crossed in the work of women artists.

1

AN INTIMATE DISTANCE

Women, artists and the body

In 1931, at the age of sixty-six, Suzanne Valadon painted a Self Portrait (Plate 1). In it, she shows herself unclothed but for a necklace, her face made up and hair cropped short in the style of a twenties flapper. Refusing to compromise with age, Valadon confronts her body without embarrassment or pity. This Self Portrait is one of many in which Valadon rigorously interrogated her own self image during her long working life.¹ Valadon was not unique as an artist in confronting the onset of old age so directly – one can think of examples from Rembrandt to Picasso – but what is striking is the clarity with which Valadon negotiates the relationship to her feminine body. The act of painting herself naked is both intimate, connected to her sense of self, and at the same time, places her body at a distance as the object of representation. Reflected as in a mirror, she stares dispassionately at the feminine body she inhabits. Valadon's look at herself opens up the third term in the creation of meaning: the viewer completes a circuit which leaps the gap between self and Other. It is this ‘intimate distance’ which this book sets out to explore.

In this chapter, I want to examine a shift from questions about representation – how the female body should be represented – to the question of subjectivity – what it means to inhabit that body: from the problem of looking (distance) to the problem of embodiment (touch). One of the themes that recurs through these essays is what such metaphors of ‘distance’ and ‘touch’ mean within a visual art practice by women. Western systems of representation in art and science have placed the act of looking at the centre of their enquiry, predicating a certain distance between the viewer and what is seen – between the subject and the object of vision.² But within recent feminist theory, logocentric vision has been questioned as a basis for women's art practice. This is concerned with ways of ‘speaking’ differently about women's bodies, both in the sense of contesting existing representations and of exploring differently embodied perspectives.

Why do questions of representation and symbolization of the female body by women matter? Michèle Barrett has suggested that within modern

Plate 1 Suzanne Valadon, Self Portrait, 1931, oil on canvas.

feminism, the ‘contestation of cultural meaning has been every bit as important as other feminist projects’ (Barrett 1992: 211). Claiming the right of women to represent themselves has been central to a feminist agenda since the struggle for the vote began over a century ago. From the late 1960s, various kinds of feminist politics have centred on women's bodies in campaigns around reproduction and health, for the right of women to control their bodies against sexual abuse and violence, and against the exploitation of women's bodies in pornography and in the mass media. The title of the first anthology of writings from the British women's movement, The Body Politic, edited by Michelene Wandor in 1972, signified the importance, both literally and metaphorically, of the body within feminist thinking. And yet, it would be true to say that, from the start, feminism has had trouble with the body. In particular, this has been with the question of how to theorize the body as the borderline between the biological and the social, the natural and the cultural, a problem to which I shall return shortly.

Twenty-five years later, issues around representation, the body and gender difference have become ever more complicated. Feminist politics have mutated and diversified, both as the result of pressures from within and in response to external conditions. Questions of the body and its status within culture and language have been at the heart of recent theoretical debates. Feminist appropriations and revisions of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory, especially the work of Michel Foucault on sexuality and of Jacques Lacan on the formation of the individual, have produced new theoretical insights which radically question the notion of a coherent female subject. Profound changes in technology and its relation to the body in the late twentieth century – most recently in gene therapy, new technologies of reproduction and emerging forms of interaction with computers – have also, in diverse ways, started to shift long held assumptions about the integrity of the body. Thus political, theoretical and technological changes intersect to produce new knowledges and understandings.

These political theoretical and technological shifts have challenged the fixed polarities of sexual difference which underpinned much early feminist art practice in the 1970s. But women's art has also begun to reconstruct our conception of what female bodies might mean in our culture. One of the key arguments of this book is that cultural production is itself a form of knowledge that can offer access to and understandings of the body which are unavailable through purely cognitive means. Women's painting, sculpture, writing, dance, performance, installation, video or film all offer us ways in which the female body has been re-imagined.

RE-IMAGINING THE BODY

In an early issue of the journal Art History, Lisa Tickner reviewed ways in which existing images of sexuality in art were being challenged by the work of women artists in the 1970s. As Tickner (1978) argued persuasively, the body was a crucial site for feminist intervention in art practice because it represented all that was perceived to be degrading in the erotic tradition of western art and yet, at the same time, it offered a means of articulating a specifically female experience. As Mary Kelly claimed subsequently, ‘the specific contribution of feminists … has been to pose the question of sexual difference across the discourse of the body in a way which focuses on the construction, not of the individual, but of the sexed subject’ (Kelly 1981: 54). But, if feminist body art of the 1970s posed the question of identity in terms of sexual difference located in the body, from the beginning there was a contradiction between the demand for a rigorous critique of existing codes of the erotic and the desire to produce new and more productive representations for women. As Janice Winship asked, ‘is it possible to create new erotic codes – and I assume that is what feminism is striving for – without in some way re-using the old?’ (Winship 1985: 25/28). Pleasure, or rather – whose pleasure? – had become a problematic issue.

Discussions about how the female body should be represented in feminist art were affected by parallel and very public debates about pornography in Britain and in the United States. Eroticized, objectified, fragmented and sometimes abused, pornography to many feminists seemed to be the paradigm for all male representations of the female body. One central objection to pornography, then as now, is that it reduces women's bodies to the status of purely sexual objects and sexuality to penetration. Metonymically, the female genitals are made to stand in for the whole female body: ‘The project of the soft core pinup is to construct sexual difference in representation by defining it in terms of, even reducing it to, bodily parts marked culturally … as feminine’ (Kuhn 1985: 38). Yet ironically, feminist body art in some ways mirrored the focus on the sexual body in pornography. As Donna Haraway commented in another context, ‘feminists here reduced women's bodies to the area revealed by the tools of gynaecology’ (Haraway 1987: 72). The intense anger fuelled by pornography debates in the late 1970s and 1980s made it a particularly difficult climate for women to work on issues of the body and sexuality. Making images of the female body became a risky business.³

The question of aesthetics was also subject to intense debate within feminist cultural theory in the late 1970s and 1980s. The project of a feminist cultural practice, some argued, should be to deconstruct existing representations of women and to problematize the pleasures that they offered. In film and the visual arts, such practices rejected narrative, figuration and illusion, in favour of textual strategies which refused any straightforward identification between viewer and image. For rather different reasons, but with similar aesthetic intent, painting as a medium was rejected in favour of photo-text, performance and ‘scripto-visual’ media.⁴ Destruction of the viewer's pleasure was to be a radical weapon and new kinds of engagement were offered which avoided any direct figuration of the female body. Probably the best known example of this type of work was Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document, 1973–9. Kelly brilliantly described the positioning of the maternal body at the edges of culture and on the boundaries of the unrepresentable. As she later argued when the work was published in book form, ‘to use the body of a woman, her image or person is not impossible, but problematic for feminism’ (Kelly 1985: xvii).⁵

‘Negative aesthetics’ offered a powerful critique of existing forms of representation and initiated a desire for change but, as Laura Mulvey later pointed out, ‘the great problem then is how to move to “something new”, from creative confrontation to creativity’ (Mulvey 1989: 161). While sometimes negative in its effects, deconstruction provided a crucial weapon in exposing the relationship between cultural forms and women's oppression. But, if women were to be represented as active desiring agents, then a return to their bodies – whether figuratively or metaphorically – seemed a necessity. The question then was how to represent the sexual body in ways which could not be framed within a ‘male gaze’.

A REPERTOIRE OF IMAGES

You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens…. even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

(Barthes 1977b: 31)

We cannot remain pure reflections, nor two dimensional flesh/bodies. Privileging the flat mirror, a technical object exterior to us, and the images which it gives back to us, can only generate for us, give us a false body, a surplus two dimensional body.

(Irigaray 1994: 12)

Roland Barthes described a passive model of our relationship to self image in which the body can only be grasped through the mirror of the reflected gaze. In contrast, Luce Irigaray rejects the metaphor of the mirror in which woman merely re-duplicates the male gaze, replacing it with the speculum whose curved surface reflects the female interior. These two accounts of the relationship between looking and embodiment offer different aspects of a debate which has occupied feminist visual theory over the last decade.

Until recently, it has been the first model which has been central to most feminist accounts of women's relationship to the body and its representation. Since the 1970s, according to John Berger's classic formulation, ‘men looked’ and ‘women appeared’ – in theory at least. Laura Mulvey's appropriation of Freudian concepts of voyeurism and fetishism gave further cogency to a binary split between women as passive objects of the look, and men as active subjects of their own desires. The theory of the ‘male gaze’ provided a powerful explanatory framework for the deepseated and enduring resistance to change of certain representations of the female body in art and cinema.⁶ Indeed, although subject to substantial revision and critique, it continued to exert a hold over feminist visual theory through the 1980s, as the representation of women in visual culture came to be viewed with deep suspicion. And, while the question of women's spectatorship did come on to the agenda – through concepts of visual transvestism, masquerade and lesbian spectatorship – a theoretical account of women as the active agents of their own desires remained largely absent in Anglo-American writing.⁷ As feminist cultural theory and practice increasingly drew on psychoanalytic theory for an explana- tory framework, Lacan's influential model of the ‘mirror stage’ further privileged sight as the means through which an individual subject gained his or her sense of imaginary bodily unity. This seemed, for the time being, to preclude any further discussion of the materiality of women's bodies without raising what Nancy Miller has tartly described as, ‘the feminist bugaboo about essentialism’ (Miller 1986: 115).

However, theories of the gaze did not exhaust the possibilities of women's relationships to the female body and its representation. Barthes' suggestion that we are forever condemned to see our own body through ‘the repertoire of its images’ seemed unduly pessimistic in implying that experiences of the body are only available through existing cultural codes. At one level, of course, this cannot be denied; since the female body has more commonly borne the gaze of others, it is inevitably mediated through many other images and representations. Even the most intimate experience can be shown to be coded and made visible through discourse. But historical examples also show otherwise. In the late nineteenth century, when women who loved other women had no public language through which to name themselves, they could still express their desires for each other, romantically and physically, but these expressions were not culturally coded as lesbian.⁸ Images and representations may frame but not entirely exclude possibilities of the body which exceed contemporary discourse.

Despite his fascination with the visual, Barthes himself offered another way of approaching the body in representation.⁹ In his 1972 essay, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Barthes suggested that the relation between representation and embodiment might be fruitfully understood at a material level:

The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. If I perceive the ‘grain’ in a piece of music and accord this ‘grain’ a theoretical value …, I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation which will certainly be individual – I am determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man or woman singing or playing and that relation is erotic – but in no way ‘subjective’… I shall not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style … but according to the image of the body (the figure) given me.

(Barthes 1977a: 188)

Barthes develops a different model of the cultural text here which addresses the ways in which the body is felt, as well as, sometimes, seen. This shift between the ‘image repertoire’ and the ‘“grain” in the voice’ suggests a slippage between a relationship based on looking and one based on other senses.

The French psychoanalyst and philosopher, Luce Irigaray, has provided the most powerful critique of the primacy of vision as a model for comprehending the female body. Irigaray argues that the look has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body
• 2 Mother Figures: The Maternal Nude in the Work of Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker
• 3 ‘A Perfect Woman’: The Political Body of Suffrage
• 4 Bodies in the Work: The Aesthetics and Politics of Women's Non-Representational Painting
• 5 Life and A.R.T.: Metaphors of Motherhood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies
• 6 Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women's Art
• 7 Identities, Memories, Desires: The Body in History
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Name Index
• Subject Index