Assignment 5: Preliminary Research and Ideas

It was going to be necessary for me to use myself as a model for my final assignment because I wanted to do a lot of drawing and my two household models' patience was wearing thin. I am not yet confident enough to start drawing subjects who are less personally known to me and where flattery might be required.  I noted down a few ideas about how to handle the self portratiture. 

I wasn't dismayed at having to do a self portrait. I had noticed that on my gallery visits I had been interested in images of women. I had also found the research point on self portratits quite stimulating. I was, however, concerned that working on self portraits might be considered narcissistic. I though that the way to avoid this might be to look in great detail at parts of my face and body like I did in the 'using colour' exercise concentrating on the textures and colours. I would be treating myself like an object- a still life or landscape and hoestly depicting features that might be considered unattractive.  This was in part stimulated by seeing Michael Landy's drawing of his father's foot with peripheral vascular disease in his 'Welcome to my World' series. He describes the details of the foot in coloured pencil and treats it as an object with no particular emotional resonance even though clearly his father is someone very important to him. Click Here for a reproduction of this image from the book 'Vitamin D' New Perspectives in Contemporary Drawing.

I thought that by using the philosophy of Cartesian Dualism (separation of mind and matter) or viewing the body like a machine like the now largely outdated philosophy often used in medicine I could avoid accusations of narcissism. 

I worked on some drawings from this angle which are posted Here. During this process, it became apparent to me that to draw a completely objective drawing of myself is actually an impossibility. I can never actually step outside my own subjective experience and the very act of drawing goes through the process object-subject-object. Also the fact that I am worried that people might think I'm narcissistic is a vanity in itself so self-regard is not being avoided - it becomes a circular argument.  I decided that I needed to look more deeply into the depiction of women and also into the concept of narcissism as it relates to self portraiture. My tutor had asked me to read and comment on two chapters of the books from the reading lists in this section so I decided to include that research here. 

I started by reading the chapter "Fashion, Likeness and Allegory" in 'Drawing Now: Eight Propositions' Laura Hoptman MOMA 2002. 

This chapter compares the work of the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid 19th Century with the work of artists working today with an aesthetic which could be considered similar. Th Pre-Raphaelites used allegory and skill in decorative form - they integrated a decorative aesthetic with highly illustrative styles of portraiture - they used allegory to give their paintings a narrative based on myths, folklore or the bible. Because of their decorative aesthetic, their work was sometimes criticised as being shallow which as also a criticism which could be levelled at some of the contemporary artists included in the chapter. The artists selected combine to a certain extent the visual languages of fine art with that of commercial art. Elzabeth Peyton, Graham Little and John Currin are the cotemporary artists included in this chapter. I also reviewed their work which is included in the other set book 'Vitamin D - New Perspectives in Contemporary Drawing'

Elisabeth Peyton makes portraits of her won friends and of celebrities. She has her own aesthetic and her portraits all have a  similar air about them. The people in them tend to be lean with high cheekbones. They ooze 'cool' and have an insouciant and androgynous quality about them. She makes them look even more attractive than they are in real life. She portrays them as a fan would. Her 'aestheticising' of her subjects could certainly be compared to the decorative quality of the Pre Raphaelites.  Her subjects always have delicate features and pale faces. She works in washes of watercolours or in coloured pencil. The images also recall images of fashion illustration. To me they remind me of Kate Moss's 'waif' and 'heroin chic' look. 

In contrast to Peyton there are a number of artists who commment negtively on celebrity culture. Dawn Mellor makes her celebrities much less aesthetically pleasing. Her portraits are more like caricatures and in some cases quite grotesque for example Christia Aguiliera in "Christina Wieners" in which she is portrayed as Saint Sebastian in a hail of arrows or "Madonna Molotov" who is grotesque and has a white cane signifying blind belief in the media. This artist is included in "Painting People-The state of the art (Thames and Hudson - 2008).

Graham Little in the other hand does not portray celebrities. The women he paints are nameless and anonymous. They have a cool distance about their demeanour and poses just like fashion models and they model recognisable high end fashion. He uses great technical skill in his handling of coloured pencil and uses decorative surfaces and pattern. One particuar painting of his of a women in an orange D&G hoodie refers back to Lord Leighton's "Flaming June". It is difficult to say whether Little's work is a daring mix of high fashion and fine art or is it is just drawing aimed at fashionistas. His drawings are certainly technically skilled and his rendering of light is quite beautiful but the remoteness and coldness of his models mean that they don't appeal to me. I suppose he is only reflecting back images from today's media so his references are contemporary but the drawings themselves don't do anything for me.

The drawing which moved me the most out of the work of all the artists in this chapter was 'The Moved Over Lady' by John Currin. (I wrote about the work of John Currin in section 4 and will not go into detail again here) This is an unassuming little drawing of an unassuming and ordinary woman. She is clearly middle aged with a fairly shapeless body and a very ordinary short hairstyle and she is rendered in shades of grey. Everything about her is average and unexciting. She is essentially bland and unglamorous so why would he choose to draw her and why should this drawing excite me more than most? This picture resonated with me as it is about the anonymity of middle age - something which I am coming to understand at the moment. This drawing has strongly influenced my preparation for assignment 5. 

I next went on to read John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' (BBC and Penguin Books 1972) and I also watched the BBC series which is available on 'You Tube' online. I have only chosen one chapter to mention here. I chose Chapter 3 (Episode 2 of the Series) which is about images of women - in particular paintings of the female nude because it is the chapter to which I had the strongest reaction.  The first few lines of Berger's narration of the episode immediately set my teeth on edge and made me bristle with indignation:

"Men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at"

"Behind every glance is a judgement"

" A Woman is always accompanied by her own image of herself" " She is taught to survey her own femininity"

A woman's "Appearance to men is though of as the success of her life". "A woman is first and foremost a sight to be looked at"

He also states that the internal observer inside each woman has a masculine viewpoint. 

All the above statements are intercut with images of women from an old and fat lady struggling along the street to beautiful young models.

I would like to think that we've made some progress since the 1970's in particular on the assertion that the success of a woman's life is dependent on her apppearance to men. However, a bit like fish when asked to describe water which replied "what's water", when something is so prevalent and all encompassing in society it can be difficult to identify it from within. I'd like to think as a professional woman that I would be judged on my abilities rather than my attractiveness. However, I do agree that women are taught to survey their own femininity, and if I am were immune to this why wuld it be difficult to accept the changes to my body and face that occur with middle age and menopause? However, I would take issue with Berger saying that my intenal observer is masculine - I don't think this is true. I think that when women are fearful of judgement they are more swayed by the opinions of other women than those of men. 

All the controversial statements that Berger makes, precede a discussion of the nude in European painting. 

Berger talks about the distinction between being a nude and being naked. Nude paintings generally depict women and are about objectification. The woman is seen as an object and not recognised for herself. She is on display for the enjoyment of a male observer. There are a few exceptions to this in which the painter has rendered a sensitive depiction of the particularities and the character of the model who is someone personally known to them. These womed are naked - without disguise ad as themselves.

Durer's attempt to create the ideal female nude using parts from various models takes this objectivication and disinterest in the individual personhood of a woman to a whole new level. Given that humanism was on the rise at the time and this was when 'individualism' first became important there is a major double standard here. Durer saw the artist as an erudite individual. A thinking man. He wanted to raise the status of artists. However, he is content to disregard completely the individuality of the woman he is painting. 

Berger then goes on to talk about Renaissance images of Adam and Eve whic depict the moment when they start to feel shame. The woman is blamed and becomes subservient to the man as punishment. 

Another popular Renassance theme was "Susannah and the Elders" in which we as the viewers join in as voyeurs along with the elders. Berger alsi outlines the hypocrisy of images purporting to represent female vanity ( women looking at themselves in the mirror) when the women have been stripped and put on display for the enjoyment of men. 

The women in nude paintings know they are being observed. They Look out from the paintings wearing expressions which suggest sexua availability. These expressions are repeated in photographs of women made to appeal to men for advertisements in glossy magazines. (See Below- there are also female archtypes here such as the mother and child suggesting the purity of the Madonna) 

The woman is made to appear that she is passive with no will of her own. This is illustrated by Charles II's painting of Nell Gwynne by Peter Lely - she is submissive - Charles wanted to display her as a possession. In European paintings, even when there is a male lover with the woman, the woman looks out at the observer rather than at the lover. (See the image of the man and woman together above) The main player/protagonist is the observer who is assumed to be male. This contrasts with other types of art (Eastern, Pre-Columbian and African art for example) in which sexual activity is depicted with the male and female both being active participants.

Traditional nudes are hairless. Berger states that this is because hair is associated with sexual passion which was meant to be the preserve of the masculine sex. I was quite amazed to find an article in the Guardian recently which detailed the removal of a painting from the Mall Galleries in London from this year's exhibition of the Society of Female Artists.  The painting was removed because of an outcry. The painting " Portrait of Ruby May Standing" by Leena McCall shows a woman standing. She looks quite directly out of the canvas. She is smoking a pipe and wearing a waistcoat and breeches. Th ebreeches are undone at the front revealing her pubic area. Apparently this was deemed 'disgusting' and 'pornographic' and the gallery was forced to remove it after numerous complaints. There is nothing remotely pornographic about the painting. I find it quite bizzare that there should be such consternation over a small glimpse of pubic hair. Especially considering that the gallery replaced this painting with a more traditional passive nude.

Berger contrasts the nude again with the concept of nakedness. The naked body is banal. On stripping and seeing the partner naked there is a loss of mystery but there is the promise of sex. He talks of sex as a process  and as a shared mystery and therefore static images of sexual nakedness can become chilling and off-putting. 

In modern art the classic category of the nude has become less important. Manet came at the end of this cycle of the female nude and his Olympia was the beginning of the end for this genre of painting. If we compare Titian's Venus of Urison  1487 -1576 with Manet's Olympia 1832-1883 we can see that the Venus is a typical passive nude, she is there inviting male pleasure. Manet's Olympia depicts a prostitute. She gives us a direct gaze. She is offering herself for sale and almost seems to be goading the male onlooker to see if he is able to fantasise about her when she is offereing herslf in a very direct way.  In an essay my Mary Elisabeth Williams on Manet's Olympia, the Author states " To worship a godess is easy, but to love a human - especially when there is no hint of reciprocation is far more work and infinitely more thrilling. Manet brough the hidden world of the everyday to light and made it remarkable"

At the end of this chapter of the book, Berger urges the reader or spectator to replace the woman in one of the paintings or photographs with a man and 'observe the violence it does to the image'. Yasumasa Morimura is a male Japanese male artist who has done just that in his 'self portrait as art history' series he superimposed his own features onto among others the face of Frida Kahlo and Manet's Olympia thereby collpsing both gender and cultural boundaries. 

As well as loking at images of women and fashion, I also touched earlier on the subject-object dichotomy which is an area of interest in contemporary art at the moment. There are some quite complex philosophical arguments surruounding this which are to do with trying to avoid subjectivity and identify with objects. Discussion of this is beyond the scope of this research point. However I recently read an article in Art Monthly entitled 'I object' which talks about some of these issues and includes reference to Mark Leckey's "the universal addressability of dumb things" some of which I saw at the Venice Biennale last year. However, before I digress too far, the point of this is that the title of this article  " I Object" indirectly led me to the work of Hannah Wilke and full circle back to the concept of Narcissism". 

Hannah Wilke's work "I Object- Memoirs of a sugargiver" 1977-78 consists of two photographs of her lying naked on some rocks. It is a statement about reclaiming the female body from the control of male artists. Her body is strong and tanned and in one of the photographs she looks directly into the camera. This was a response to Wilke's objection to the pale and anonymous rape victim in Duchamp's "Etant donnes". The title is clearly wordplay on the objectification of women. 

Hannah Wilke was a young and attractive woman and therefore many feminists dismissed her as a narcissist.  I found an essay by Jennifer Linton (JenniferLinton.com) entitled "Feminist Narcissim and the Reclamation of the Erotic Body" which was prepared as part of a graduate programme in fine arts. In this essay, Linton talks about narcissism. The vernacular use of the word is taken to mean the pathological sort of self regard and vanity and it is often directed at women. Linton posits feminist narcissism as a positive sort of self love. When feminists dismissed Wilke as a narcissist they were using it in the vernacular context in an anti female context which seems quite odd behaviour. 

Having looked at Hannah Wilke, I also came accross the work of Rosy Martin and Jo Spence and was partularly disturbed by one of her "Photo therapy" works in which text is projected onto an ageing female body - "The vagina begins to shrivel.....  " from Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask" 1969 and also " After women have lost their genital function....." Sigmund Freud " the dispostion to obsessionsl neurosis 1913"

So I've come round in a big meandering loop back to issues of narcissism, objecthood and ageing. There's plenty to think about here and a starting point for some investigation.

Reference Material Used:

Drawing Now: Eight Propositions. Laura Hoptman (MOMA 1992)

Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing Emma Dexter (Phaidon 2005)

www.rosymartin.info/performative_body.html

Ways of Seeing John Berger (BBC and Penguin Books 1972)

I Object - art and the new objecthood Maria Walsh (Art Monthly Nov 13; 371, pp 9-12)

Painting People- The state of the Art Charlotte Mullins (Thames and Hudson 2008)

Feminist Narcissism and the Reclamation of the Erotic Body (Prepared for a graduate class in contemporary art theory York University Ontario May 2009) Jennifer Linton (Jenniferlinton.com)

"Pornographic and disgusting" painting removed from top London exhibition because it features a woman's pubic hair" Adam Withnall , The Independent, 8th July 2014