An essay on cultural representations of female bodies
I seek to interpret the female body as a maker of meaning through the frame of spectatorship by examining the female body in Carolee Schneemann’s performance, Interior Scroll (1975) and very briefly, The Naked Lecture (1968). I believe this is important because it challenges the way of looking at the female body as an object of desire and instead takes a political stance of empowerment by being the maker of meaning. This thesis will be analysed and supported by the concepts of feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), feminist scholar, Peggy Phelan in her book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance and through the contributions of psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. With the aid of Mulvey and Phelan, I will look into the cultural representation of female bodies to unpack the formation of the male gaze and the unmarked female body. The roots of these notions will be further excavated through Lacanian psychoanalysis, which will play a key role in understanding the unconscious workings behind these modes of representation and ways of seeing the female body.
Cinema, one of the representations of culture (whether western or eastern), has influenced the understanding of the world around us. It has shaped the way we see the body, particularly the female body. Referring to Mulvey, “Cultural representation especially cinema has displayed the woman’s function on two levels: as erotic object for characters in the screen story and as erotic object for the spectator.”(1975, 5)This is reflected in most cinematography, where fragmented shots of isolated parts of a woman’s body are emphasized. These shots serve no purpose to the plot itself but gives the spectator permission to find pleasure in looking at an eroticised image. This particular nature or way of looking is the male gaze. (Mulvey, 1975, 3) Gaze plays an essential role in the context of performance, not only because it is one of the mediums through which performance is received by the spectator but because it plays a dominant role in the way it is perceived. As Mulvey states, the scopophilic “takes other people as objects and subjects them to a controlling and curious gaze” (1989, 3) and derives pleasure in doing so. This is the basis for the erotic identity that is projected by the spectator on Schneemann’s (naked) body in these two works.
To understand the formation of erotic identity further, it’s essential to recognize that male gaze in itself has deeper roots of origin, one of them being, sexual difference. This is conceived in the patriarchal unconscious which is the unconscious of a male driven system where power primarily lies in the hands of male figures. In this structure, the perspective of a man is validated and represented more than that of a woman who is non-subject or the Other. This refers to the position of object that a woman is placed in, by patriarchal figures. Being an object is where a particular action or feeling is directed to it or something is being done to it as opposed to being a subject, who has the power to do. When we combine the concept of male gaze with this object-subject relationship a split within the genders of male and female occur. Referring to Mulvey, “Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (1989, 4).This dichotomy develops into her being “isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised” (1989, 6).
With this understanding, I would now like to introduce the seminal work of Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll (1975). She enters the room covered in a sheet of cloth and an apron, she stands on a table, disrobes, outlines her body with mud and performs ‘action poses’ after which she reads from her book Cezanne. She was a great painter. She then extracts a scroll from her vagina, which has typewritten text of misogynistic responses a female artist receives, which she reads out loud. In my opinion, at no point does the body actively and consciously participate in the perception of the ‘erotic female body’ to be manifested, yet that happens. In order to locate where the creation of voyeuristic ways of controlling and possessing a woman’s body by the spectator, in this context Schneemann’s body, comes from, I would like to highlight the connection between male gaze, the dichotomy of active and passive within the genders and the projection of erotic identity.
We can see this in the Interior Scroll when Schneemann stands on the table and strikes ‘action poses’, referring to the poses that were mostly made by women for nude still lifes. She recreates the erotic projection, common in visual culture (like nude paintings of women or isolated shots in cinema to eroticise female bodies), by putting her naked body on the table as if on display. She upturns the ‘traditional exhibitionistic role’ (Chaudhuri, 2009, 35) and the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey, 1989, 8) assigned to women in cinema and popular culture, by the ‘displayed’ female engaging in an active role of speaking and creating. The exhibitionist, by definition is “a perversion in which sexual gratification is obtained from the indecent exposure of one's genitals (as to a stranger)” (Merriam Webster).
I bring in the above perception of the ‘eroticised (female) body’ to question this notion of exhibitionism and to further emphasize that the body doesn’t eroticize itself nor does it gain sexual gratification. In fact, Schneemann turns the gaze back towards male gaze, which is an act of subversion. She plays with the “exchange of gazes” (Phelan, 1993, 4) by portraying the naked female body and re-contextualising ‘her’ image in spaces of power, on the table and not under or away from visibility by extracting an autobiographical text of misogyny, exclusion and invisibility. This subversion is enabled by manipulating this masculine gaze which controls or territorialises a woman’s appearance. Schneemann subverts the passive female role and takes charge of this visual domination by de-territorialising it from the male gaze through verbalizing and making visible her experiences of misogyny. Through this active choice of removing her clothes and extracting text she is disrupting the social construction of a naked woman being only for desire or meaningless as a subject.
In cinema or in the representation of nude women in paintings, both a form of storytelling, through cinematographic codes or visual subtexts, mythologies of the sexualised female are created. Thus, further conditioning the male gaze by building her into an erotic spectacle. To further unpack this phenomena of the erotic spectacle, we can analyse the patriarchal unconscious through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Through this lens:
“woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent, image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” (Mulvey, 1989, 1)
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Symbolic Order is the Father/Male who has the phallus and thus represents power. So a child, from direct connection with mother and a space of abundance, the Semiotic Chora (that which precedes language), births into a place of lack, the Symbolic Order. The child enters this Symbolic Order or the social world through learning linguistic structures of syntax and semantics. This traumatic separation from the womb along with the loss of power because of the absence of the phallus (in the case of a girl child) causes a castration anxiety. This double loss creates her Otherness, in psychoanalytic terms.
In Interior Scroll, these symbolisms or metaphors emerge. The extraction of the scroll as an umbilical cord emerging into the symbolic order or in Freudian (Lacan’s predecessor) terms as a ‘phallic’ symbol it is interesting to see how she enters the symbolic with linguistic command through writing/text and speech which is consisted of syntax and semantics, as she reads out loud and is thus subverting the passive, ‘silent image of woman’ as the erotic spectacle. She is channelizing the potential within the female body, in particular, the vagina as a tool for being the producer or maker of meaning. Through this linguistic command she is fighting the language of the patriarchy and the Symbolic Order.
Similarly, in Casey Jenkins, Melbourne-based performance artist’s, work Casting off my womb (2013), she knits wool extracted from her vagina over a period of 28 days which also marks her menstrual cycle in the process. Jenkins, partially clothed and almost contemplative in nature, uses the representation of ‘womanhood’ through the activity of knitting which has been dominantly identified as a feminine activity. Yet, within these established representations, she creates a powerful image of an active female maker by representing the vagina as a tool for making and producing meaning and not only for the purpose of pleasure. She attempts to thwart stigma towards menstruation by making the menstrual cycle visible thus questioning the socially established eroticism of the woman.
This performance, like the Interior Scroll, shakes this established notion and gives voice to female sexuality (the way people experience and express themselves sexually) as opposed to eroticism (a quality that causes sexual feelings) by placing the perceived symbol of erotic, the vagina, as an apparatus of the active author/maker. They both reach out to the elemental aspect of their bodies and craft/culture, namely, the vagina and knitting in Casting off my womb and the vagina and the scroll-text in Interior Scroll. By elemental, I refer to using the fundamental body part that identifies female and the fundamental innuendo of vagina and pleasure that is used in cultural representation, thus again, subverting the erotic spectacle.
In context of spectatorship, it’s astonishing for me to see how the spectators of both these performances, which have a gap of 38 years, have similar reactions. Both performances, received highly critical responses ranging from attention-seeking or exhibitionist to fear and repulsion. This reflects how the idea of the vagina holding power, visibility and meaning is threatening for society even today. This perception has been heavily fueled through representation in cinema and culture over the years. If representation means that the subject holds the power then women should hold more power. But the subject here undergoes misrepresentation through objectification, where she is reduced to the position of object through the workings of the male gaze. In representing herself willingly naked, speaking and writing in Interior Scroll, Schneemann is subverting that objectified representation and is reclaiming power through authorship of knowledge or meaning that she creates and through the ownership of her body. This reclamation of power is through remoulding the representational real. Referring to Phelan, ‘redesigning the representational real’ (1993, 3) is the idea of the Real (sexual difference where woman is the object that representation offers) being redesigned or altered. I believe, when Schneemann represents herself as an active maker, she sees the “blind spot in the visible real” (Phelan,1993, 3) which is the social construction of male having power through authorship/linguistic command and ownership/male gaze and thus being considered active.
The relationship between this remodeled real, where the woman is indeed active and has power, and the representational (in films and visual culture as passive/eroticised/fetishized) is questioned. And through this play she brings to light the relation between self and other. She seeks the process of self-identity and “self-image within the representational frame” (Phelan, 1993, 5) by reinstating her power and redesigning the frame in order to create a new sign or new frame of seeing the female with value, as opposed to the value of the unmarked. Unmarked refers to the Other/that which is not (or does not possess a phallus and is thus powerless) and the marked (male) being the phallus/power. According to Phelan, “she is remarked through cultural representations. He remains unremarked because He is the norm and She is the Other who he remarks” (1993, 5).This failure to represent sexual differences forms the binaries of positive/negative, seen/unseen which frames the perception of woman (Phelan, 1993, 5) and leads to fetishizing her.
Schneemann is treading on these boundaries of seen/unseen, firstly, by being naked she is explicitly showing the sexual difference after striking action poses to represent a social structure to an audience. Through the direct use of language she emancipates the- speaking-naked female artist. She converts the normative seeing of the unseen into a non-fetishized entity but instead one that represents her invisibility (on a personal and societal level). Her personal experience of affliction with the invisibility of the woman especially as a female artist ranges from a film critic who wouldn’t watch and write about her films to male teachers in art school that discouraged her from pursuing art to the misogyny that a female artist goes through. As Phelan, quotes, “seeing as a way of knowing” (1993, 5), the personal becomes the political for Schneemann.
By looking at The Naked Lecture briefly, it further supplements the Interior Scroll and this thesis. The two common elements between the works are that of the naked female body and the production of knowledge/meaning. In this performance, she dresses and undresses on a lecture stage with a white overall and invites volunteers to join her, to be naked and covered in paste to jump into a pile of shredded paper, as she shows art works that have influenced her kinetic work. She undergoes a process of marking and unremarking herself by wearing white overalls to suggest male authority and removing them to reveal the (unseen) female body which is read as an invitation for sex. The white overalls (male authority) marks her body and makes her own body within, unseen and concealed by dominating/possessing her skin/body. This play between wearing and removing in a place of power is her process of unremarking herself. She is creating agency within these identity politics.
Similarly, in Interior Scroll, she is an agent by manifesting her interiority by extracting the scroll with autobiographical text. To make interiority as a spoken concept is important for Schneemann, in order to manifest the information about the body. Through manifesting this information or knowledge that arises from her second mouth, vagina, she is undoing the “denigration of female creative energies” (Schneemann). For her, the vagina is a “source of knowledge, the source of production, creation, birth passage” (Schneemann) and through this extraction and reading she is suggesting that women should have complete control over their mode of expression. Through making visible the unseen and unremarking her self-image and that of the archetype of woman she is emancipating ‘her’ from the symbolic order by bringing agency from the semiotic chora.
Schneemann’s performances, now in retrospection, have played a key role in altering ways of seeing the female body. Her work has aided in redesigning the erotic image of the female body to re-establish ‘herself’ as a maker of meaning and thus gain empowerment by confronting the systematic oppression of female sexuality, representation and authorship in the patriarchal order. Through her symbolic transgressions, she has provided a strong critique of cultural representations of female bodies. It might not be an immediate change that could be instantly measured but she stirred up ways of thinking, looking and representing female bodies and the authorial and intellectual power that they hold. She has been a “force” in the feminist art and performance art movement. “Force” being “the influence which any experience has in determining what the other experiences shall succeed it” (Turner, 1987, 30). Her work plays a significant role in engaging with discourses about the politics of identity and gender. The controversial nature of this subject matter stays highly alive even today. Contemporary works dealing with gender and nakedness still receive similar apprehensions of the late 70’s. Yet, I believe that through continually remodeling established perceptions, great change can be made, over time. Like how Schneemann’s work has paved the way for empowerment of the vagina as a tool for voicing the issues of female representation and gender inequality. Even though, 44 years later, this need is prevalent, she has left a thriving legacy to support future (female) artists and makers.
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