Is this Love? Comparing the representations of personal trauma and female sexuality in art photography

Nan after being battered, 1984, Nan Goldin

Agata Mlynczak

‘Is it true the ribs can tell

The kick of a beast from a

Lover’s fist? The bruised

Bones recorded well

The sudden shock, the

Hard impact. Then swollen lids,

Sorry eyes, spoke not

Of lost romance, but hurt.’

—Maya Angelou from ‘And Still I Rise,’ 1986

For Hayles (2006) the memory of trauma can be thought of as a total non-linguistic bodily experience—instead of words it operates with a code of images that comprise the victim’s ever-present, spectral body of pain. With this in mind in this essay I explore representations of sexuality and trauma, and their co-existence in contemporary art photography. What my analysis indicates is that the topic of female sexuality as a battle and the feminine body as a battlefield are not given enough space in artistic storytelling. Thus I find Sophie Calle’s disembodied approach to psychological trauma and the spectral embodiment of Nan Goldin’s physical trauma important to look at in detail. I will go in depth with two projects: ‘Exquisite Pain’ by Sophie Calle and ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ by Nan Goldin—also with reference to Helen Chadwick’s work from 1989. They are candid photographic, narrative self-portraits of artists undergoing two different experiences of love betrayal. My focus is on their personalized visual codes depicting trauma within the body and identity. Comparing their visual notes on the specific traumatizing factors like: loss, attachment, abuse and sexuality, I will look at their treatment of the photographic documentary style in a diary-form and the differences between tendencies towards intervention and preservation. The analysis of the relationships between identity and trauma will follow a structure of consecutive arguments in sections: Sexuality and Identity, Trauma and Diaries, Expanded Identity and Environment, Approach to Truth, Abject and The Space of Trauma, Intervention and Preservation, Conclusion. And finally, I will conclude that the approach of both artists reflects that crystalizing the truth of their experience from memory and from mementos—diary photography—was of great importance in order for the diaries to have an artistic impact on their audience and also for the self de-traumatization of female identity post-trauma, through the medium of art, to work. All this for a creative, artistic realization of what is not love.

SEXUALITY, IDENTITY

In the photographic art project ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ by Nan Goldin the abusive is mixed together with the gratifying. The sexual dependency seems to mean the kind of addictive, sexual, dead-end companionship with the same person that also inflicts life-threatening harm and pain. Nan’s experience of a sexual bond is framed as a thing that perpetuated and normalized the unacceptable repetitive physical assault. The book was constructed out of 15 years’ worth of diary work. The tears are unavoidable and never seem to be the reason for putting the camera away. The picture of Nan ‘battered’ by her lover for the last time splits the book in half. The motto of the book—the author’s drive and mission—is stated in two sentences: ‘I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history. I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again’ (Goldin: 2013). This unforgiving approach to ‘truth’ is supposed to ensure the legitimacy for her own new research into definitions of love, hate and intimacy that comprise the community of dependent people. We are witnesses to the evidence of those definitions’ factual existence. The Ballad is her external memory and attempt to ultimately comprehend the community that challenged the norms, gave her security yet, still sustained her self-destructive, co-dependent idea of romance.

Sophie Calle fabricates the narrative in her art pieces: she mixes facts with fiction or juxtaposes them making and remaking herself into a character that keeps getting redefined in her own artistic storytelling spread across the gathered super-opus of nearly her entire artistic achievement. Douleur Exquise (Exquisite Pain, 1984-2003) is a journal of pictures and text that is structured like the Georgian calendar—split into two eras. One that counts down to the year 0 and then the other that counts up from it as if it was the beginning of a new era. Calle’s character marks the date of the painful break-up of her romantic relationship as the point of no return (McFadden, 2014: 231).

Originally the work was presented as an installation in two parts: numbered photos from the trip counting down to the break-up and secondly, embroidered linen pieces with the artist’s personal story told from different angles and alternating with other people’s recollections of pain. Using the diary form—as if in an afterthought—she creates a controlled representation of the three moths leading up to the heartbreak and then months of the aftermath day by day—a recovery supplemented by a collection of ninety-nine stories of grief. Both works are self-prescribed medication for relapse into a cul-de-sac love.

TRAUMA and DIARIES

For Hooks (2000: 8) ‘Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse,’ and Hooks sacrificed a big part of her career to make women aware of the dangers of normalization of the co-existence of love and assault. She made a point about the kind of affection that silences the sensitivity towards a partner’s violent dominance in the simultaneous presence of their care. Finally, she has been an advocate of the view that this type of affection is not love. She was not the first one: Maya Angelou has written about it countless times such as the exerpt from ‘And Still I Rise’ above from the 1980s.

A similar distinction was made by the artists who manifest their hard-earned defiance of the ideal of a self-sacrificing, generous, mother-woman. Thus, they represent female sexuality as a culprit—an enemy that will make women fall prey to an abusive man. In this context, sexuality is a factor that desensitizes woman’s instinct for self-care. To describe sex Nan Goldin uses words like: consuming, battleground, gratification, and a conflict-intensifying exorcism; while Sophie Calle operates taking advantage of the absence of her body or any body at all. The space and her gaze upon it become the actual, ascetic, protagonist dehumanized by grief. At the end of the healing stories though the body remains a battlefield—in ‘Ballad’—and an absence—in ‘Exquisite Pain’, sexuality is not reclaimed, however it is exorcised from the toxic lover who becomes redefined by impending consequences of abuse denormalization.

Before that can happen the trauma has to be recognized. As ‘Grisellda Pollock suggests five defining features of trauma; perpetual presentness, permanent absence, irrepresentibility, belatedness and transmissibility’ (Pollock, 2013: 2). While Bracha (1999) brings attention to art’s capacity to heal, challenging Lacan’s concept of female psychology and claims that art labours between aesthetics and ethics by deepening and widening of the viewer’s threshold of fragility. This concept could be applied to the publishing of personal journals. If they seem authentic, diaries receive legitimacy needed for people to endorse any hitherto unfamiliar lifestyle. Their disarming honesty contributes to the expansion of viewers’ sensitivity and the creation of bonds involving understanding, compassion and empathy. Thus it can be argued that diaries have the healing power Ettinger is talking about— a potential to broaden cultural norms, undo taboos, deconstruct traumas and deepen society’s capacity for inclusive care.

Nan Goldin and Sophie Calle both use the diary format to make their intimate pain public. They both depict their bodies of trauma using images that no longer portray objects figuratively but the states of mind. They attempt to reconstruct the ‘irrepresentable’—permanent memory that is a non-verbal record escaping a literary description. In the case of Calle, the language of memory controls her and the overall situation, so she sets out to reclaim the control by organizing the sequence of photographic notes into a controlled, self-reflective series. This way she constructs the build up to the break-up. Yet thereafter, she limits herself to the repetitive jabs of the red telephone’s doom-laden presence indicative of her loss of identity as a picture-maker—her creative powerlessness in the face of the overwhelming image of trauma.

EXPANDING IDENTITY AND ENVIRONMENT

The identity in the end of both projects is shown as psychologically expanded by the inclusion of the community. Calle comes into a communion with acquaintances and strangers by exchanging painful stories and this inflicts a development in her approach to the story. The character of ‘Sophie Calle’ becomes expanded by the brutal and perhaps continually traumatizing confrontations with unknown suffering. Exposed to this process the artist points to her slow growth out of the despair by gradual brightening of color on the pages containing her post-traumatic story. This identity change stands in sharp contrast to exclusively first-person thoughts and experiences narrated in the first half of the book. There, Sophie Calle seems to be looking at herself from an informed distance.

In contrast, Goldin seems to include the entire community into her character from the start. I took Goldin’s initial claim about the queer notions of gender in her community as a key to understanding the inexplicable gendering of the groups of portraits. Controversially though, the artist puts exclusive focus on a destructive tension within a heterosexual relationship. This becomes apparent in the chapters that gather sets of portraits alternating between men and women: this binary division is followed by polarized identity expressions with the demonic inter-masculine bonds on group portraits confronted with the shyly tender single male portraits and juxtaposed as ‘the men’ with the attentive and sacrificing females. Both groups are equally dependent, yet, only one of them seems to act as the perpetrator. This homogeny points to the series being Nan Goldin’s own elaborate reconstruction of personal history using her friends as stand-ins for the scenes that were missing. This way, she presents herself as a manifold, spectral body with multiple expressions, engagements and looks: yet one desire and one pain. Thus the artist’s identity is dual—as an archetype in everyone’s mythology of sexual dependency and as one of the individual characters in the history of the fragile community.

APPROACH TO TRUTH

Nan Goldin seems to believe that her photographs are ‘true’ and that this is the sole and most important role of photography. Although the battered self-portrait of Goldin received a conflicted public response as a result of people’s distrust towards the photographic medium: people were questioning its authenticity. On the other hand, despite that she thought of it as a piece of a criminal evidence, the artist recalls many people that interpreted the picture to be an act of man’s love (in the ‘Afterword’). This is especially disappointing because term ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ seem to lay the foundations as to how she feels about her work—a crime-scene document, a love exorcism, a personal history.

Conversely, Sophie Calle was led to undergo a public conversation with a psychoanalyst investigating whether the story of ‘Exquisite Pain’ was real or fictional. She claimed that all was true and nothing was invented—that she is not able to invent. She also complained about the mistrust of the audience though she makes a distinction between ‘the truth’ and ‘what happened’. She says that presentation of a certain aspect of reality in an isolated manner does not make it the whole truth but it also does not mean that it did not happen.

ABJECT THE SPACE OF TRAUMA

If I bring in Helen Chadwick’s work from 1989, produced a series of light-boxes talking about trauma through photographic compositions of cut-out—almost sampled—sections of body. The series includes eleven works, which came out one by one over a period of time yet, were gathered under a collective title ‘Meat Lamps’. While being suggestive of femininity, they are a conceptual venture into sexuality, desire and the nature of the body and body representation. ‘Enfleshings I’ and II were followed by ‘Eroticism’ that consisted of two images of naked and vulnerable human brains installed in close relationship to each other. The neighboring sides of the organs are illuminated by a blue light—a suggestion of a gravity force filling up the negative space: the sticky brains are lying alone, bodiless and detached in what looks like satin sheets—a sight painful to watch. In my interpretation, Chadwick portrayed a relationship of two traumatizing fragilities. A dissected ‘body and mind’ entity in a state of an intimate interaction with its own reflection: two non-erotic meat-like pieces of flesh and their nevertheless charged negative space. In this case it could be said that she focused on sexuality as an extension of thought across a traumatizing space.

What comes out of it is that the proximity and the environment become the traumatizing factors. Similar to Calle’s work, where the lack of any proximity to the loved one turns into a haunting presence among the heavy nothingness of the empty rooms/material objects that is the loss and that is the trauma. The body of the artist becomes the abject art that the audience is not allowed to look at. The gaze is directed towards the image from inside the tormented psyche. The distancing and the absence are so pertinent that Calle becomes her voice transmitting a variety of other people’s traumas: she transforms herself into a pit-stop for them, a balloon soul tied to the ground, exposed to the winds. And, she shows us how the trauma erodes. Yet before this happens, it is the landscape of the lonely negative space around the eye (and the mind’s eye) of the artist that becomes the torturer. Conversely, Nan Goldin gives great attention to the closeness of the bodies of her old companions and their impact on one another’s fragility. Golden shows the stuffiness of collective living. The proximity of the loving flesh and the aching flesh is the trauma of that habitat visually painted by flash-illuminated skin in claustrophobic darknesses.

INTERVENTION VS PRESERVATION

Calle is aware of her role as a present artist whose actions are her projects, while Goldin acts more as a documentarist who captures, categorizes, organizes and presents a memento, she is on a quest for taking charge of her own feelings. Despite the fact that she mostly works with documentary techniques, her artwork’s coming into being depends on her intervention. The results of her actions are unknown and undersigned—it is a journey of discovery. In case of ‘Exquisite Pain’—in a situation when something unexpectedly traumatic happens to her—she reacts with an attempt to take back control and keep reconstructing the tormenting memory of the events surrounding it until it becomes a public story, susceptible to manipulation, redesign; or in other words an exorcism from the private experience of pain. The project is about transforming one’s unbearable intimacy with pain. The confrontations with different pain-evoking stories seem to be enforced by the artist to control, lessen and overcome. The privacy of the traumatic experiences brought up in ‘Exquisite Pain’ seems redundant. Calle is not withholding painful stories due to the fact that their universal nature makes the knowledge of them helpful for people living with those pains. Thus here, I interpret making the personal public as the artist’s answer to confronting trauma.

CONCLUSION

The art of Nan Goldin is both in harmony and opposition to abject art. Coined by Julia Kristeva in 1980, this term covers the concept of elements which are cast-off from the public eye and, as the trend in art, it focused on revealing various hidden aspects of life defying the culturally-imposed notions of their repugnancy, dirtiness and inappropriateness. The post-traumatic memorial series of ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ could be interpreted as an attempt to make space in the public consciousness for the types of passions that would be considered lazy, non-guilt-free and toxic. Their hidden, romantic, addictive and communion-like ambiguity though seems to be a secret power that unrevealed becomes a dangerous abject for the victims of a love trauma. A similar ambition for defying a binary perception of good and bad emotions is transmitted by Sophie Calle when she asks other people to expose their traumatic memories in their entire crushing bitter-sweetness. What follows, for Sophie Calle is actively overcoming the Lacanian conceptual marriages of femininity and psychosis, the feminine and art object, the feminine and loss, and the feminine and sacrifice. With a special attention to the loss and the self-sacrifice she transforms her own experience and puts it in perspective as not to get seduced by the melancholic despair. Nan Goldin is pin pointing the devastating results of the western model of a ‘good life’ and thus a good love. Without commenting on it directly the artist seems to set out to reveal the treachery of the glorious dream of ever-lasting, romantic, self-sacrificial, feminine love. She reveals her inattention by giving the audience ironic hints, for instance, the series opens and closes with ‘out-of-character’ diptychs of old couples and other images. The people on the first picture seem to be a reflection of the accompanying image—the inanimate ‘prefect’ bodies of the shopping display mannequins—while, on the last spread in the book this order is reversed and the second elderly couple sees their reflection in two graffitied corpses forever locked in a passionate kiss—as if torn by abusive dependency even in the afterlife. This occurs to me as Goldin’s ironic remark about the dangerous dream of ‘pure’ love. Thus ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is part a cautionary tale and part a deconstruction of specific, mysterious, romantic impossibilities that have to occur in order to sweep away the traumatic traces leading to a potential relapse. Thus, after Bracha Ettinger’s ideas on the memory of trauma, Nan Goldin can be interpreted as setting out to expand both her own as well as the viewer’s blocked sensitivity and de-traumatise the nature of this memory. Thus the idea of toxic romantic love becomes deconstructed in order for a future model to come in.

 

Bibliography

Calle, S. (2005). Exquisite pain. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Ettinger, Bracha (1999) ‘Art as the Transport Station of Trauma’, pp. 91-116 in Art Working 1985–1999, Brussels: Palais des Beaux Arts and Ghent: Ludion.

Goldin, Nan (2013). Ballad of sexual dependency. New York: Artbook D A P.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2006) ‘Traumas of Code’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 1, https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/traumas_of_code_by_n._katherine_hayles

Hooks, Bell (2000) All About Love: New Visions, New York: Harper. p. 8.)

McFadden, Cybelle (2014) Gendered Frames Embodies Cameras: Varda, Ackerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn, Lanham: Farleigh Dickinson UP.

Pollock, Grisellda (2013) After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Rethinking Art’s Histories), New York: Manchester University.

Through which orifice does he speak? A critical interpretative analysis of select works of Alighiero E Boetti relating to the function and form of Apophenia, glossolalia and the scatalogic

Figure 1: Mappa Del Mundo – Aligihiero e Boetti, 1989

Richard Maguire

How one speaks is often gauged through aspects of morality: specifically veritas (truthfulness), logic, sense and language’s capacity for intelligibility. Together they factor a notion in determining if one is speaking out of one’s head or ass. The premise of this essay is an analysis on select works of Alighiero e Boetti in relation to the form and function of: apophenia and its usage as a stratagem to find common-ground, glossolalia and its function of using difference as mechanism to find areas of similitude, and the scatalogical where if everything has meaning, as much as nothing has meaning, does it mean anything? Or is it all shit? To garner these results I shall utilise a critical interpretative analysis on the following works: Mappa Series (1971-1989); I Sei Sensi (1974-5) and Tutto (1987). Through which orifice does he speak? In the case of Boetti, he may be seen to speak through both mouth and anus.

The approach of Boetti and artists who devised similar strategies has often been cited in contemporaneity as the elitist reluctance to engage in active social discourse (Beech & Roberts, 2002: 297). However, I don’t believe this is accurate. The complexity in deciphering the conceptual tangencies of artists like Boetti is the manner in which it (their Logos) derives. Boetti’s conceptual framework rejects “enlightenment rationale” and its hierarchical models of values, favouring rhetorical tropes comprised of disparate sources: like Zen and Sufi philosophy as equal to that of classical European philosophy (Obrist, 2012). He rejects the models and framework of empiricism and rationalism and the innate prejudices that these ‘objective’ models avow (Smith, 2013). This positioning unlike that of his European modernist precursors doesn’t harken back to a colloquial or nationalised mythology, nor does it utilise the ‘other’ through the gaze of the coloniser. What medium specificity and the canonised practise of history painting and monument making presupposed in the modernistic legacy was utilising methodologies in which recognisable stances, archetypes, and pictorial conventions were recycled, for then an image had a conventional pictorial legibility or a determining reference point (Hasenmueller, 1978). Canonization, then gave works an absolute value. Boetti is different, value lies in the synonymity and collapsibility of language: pictorial and textual alike. The meaning of value then lies in where degrees of linguistic currency are eschewed instead of being easily consumable.

Glossolalia—speaking difference towards similitude

Beginning in 1971 the Mappa series was a continuous collaboration between Afghani women and Boetti until his death in 1994. The embroideries themselves exist in the tradition of oriental rugs with each Mappa produced traditionally by the women, by hand, with no interaction directly between either artist or artisan. They all consist of a flattened map of a globe but vary between embroidering techniques, colour and rendering. At large the issue remains of whom is speaking? Artist or artisan, what are they saying—what do they mean? Any intelligible language such as that on the work’s border is of the artisans: the women are perceived to have been vocalised. One would assume—perhaps naively—that their voices are pure, but in a culture in which women were inhibited academically their ability to render voice through text has to have been rendered by proxy. If narration within the works or the titles exist in the manner of stating outright that they are handcrafted by unnamed women who had fled from their native lands, or were made by Afghan people in Peshawar—meaning is not rendered alone by the insinuation of war, nor is it on the literal displacement of refugees post-political regime change. It is the interpolation of what a formal guise (a map) is that (logically) dictates what it is. If in this case ‘rationality’, ‘legibility,’ or ‘commonality’ is the reasoning whereby Western consumers know what the maps are, the Logos of veritas in representation as a matter of principle is then that they are read as such—they are what they are (Marder, 2016). But when maps are reduced to the most elemental symbolic meaning, i.e. their flags, they are reduced of their history and geographical basis. If meaning or rationalism is displaced (i.e. orienting one-self psychically or physically) they act then as the initial site in which disruption occurs.

Although Boetti himself would profess that he has done nothing, what renders meaning in the case of the Mappa series is the multiplicity of viewpoints (Boetti & Cooke, 2012: 167). Glossolalia is the terminology in which speech lacks readily comprehendible meaning, although classically this has not always been so. Glossolalia at one point had a collapsible/exchangeable meaning with ‘xenoglossy’ —a language unbeknownst to the speaker, but known to others as a credible tongue (Martin, 2009). If the vocalisation of an Afgani woman would be perceived as ‘nonsense’, one most allude to the fact it is deemed nonsensical because it privileges a viewpoint deemed as of low-value as opposed to of being of high import (Steryl, 2018).

If as Boetti stated he is doing nothing, and is speaking (as opposed to miming or imitating) the other without being; or disrupting the integrity their speech, he is talking in tongues. These formations (maps/western conventions) then become formulations for the glossolalic, in which convention is circumvented to become a mode of expression. Boetti then is seen to encompass the expression of the other, where Boetti’s namesake becomes an active site in which the other becomes a reified body or tongue.

Figure 1. (Alighiero e Boetti, 1989) is representative of this true suspension of traditional Logos, through restructuring Western models for knowledge dispensation for those contrary to the ‘other’, Mappa becomes the model in which the format condenses itself as a means in which the other then dispenses its voice. Those whom have been seen as ‘other’ are then equally imbued with value as the same to those whom have been previously privileged. It is thus in the formation of being embedded within a literal map one becomes the same as the other. If we can acknowledge that this phenomena can occur as real (or corporeal), we must also acknowledge sites in which traditional logic itself is suspended.

Apophenia: an area of common ground

As previously stated, Boetti’s interest in the functionality and linguistic capacity of symbols and signifiers and whether they are mutually intelligible—and when they are not, how do they hybridise? (Obrist, 2001). Hybridisation occurs often in a format in creating the appearance of a singular western voice and then imbuing it with the other, this hybridisation is glossolalic as it is Boetti who speaks in multiplicitous registers, using several pictorial/linguistic formations to speak in tongues, but then how is it a Logos to decipher and garner a linguistic element found?

Order and disorder is normally the way in which Boetti’s work is categorised, it presents a rationale in which the incoherent can be contextualised. Contextualisation then seeks to offer a means of finding meaning in what is seen to be incoherent. What I’m positing in this instance is that rather than offering actualised polarities in which the works exist, order/disorder poses a set of parameters in which the work exists between. This firmament of being ‘between’ in many aspects is the apophenic. To clarify this point I would suggest Boetti’s name as a case in point; Alighiero e Boetti. Although we read (universally) as the ‘e’ being an abbreviation of a middle name, this is incorrect. This addition to the name of Boetti serves to highlight the straddling between or inability to posture himself in a solid logical framework. Translated as literally Alighiero and Boetti from his native Italian, Boetti sought to remediate two polarities of both practice and person-hood as explained during an interview with Bruno Cora (Boetti & Cooke, 2012: 206). It is thus that the apophenic e is more significant rather than the conventional paradigms of the artist as being either Alighiero or Boetti.

For Boetti he referenced that the apophenic (between order and disorder) was to be utilised as an aesthetic principle, in that, engagement with works was to be seen similar to gameplay espousing that: everyone has the capacity to participate and that some are better than others (Boetti & Cooke, 2012: 25). Apophenia in Boetti’s practice is not garbled speech, nor is it the appearance of garbled speech. Apophenia serves as a methodological tool akin to a lingua franca, in which the contrasting paradigms of ‘I/you/we’ and ‘them’ become an image-based vocabulary in which the viewer finds meaning within the contents of the works. It is this that serves to function as a mediation ground for difference in which the capacity of a comprehensible Logos would progress to a Creolisation of paradigms. (Obrist, 2012)

An example of this would be evident in the piece I sei sensi / Figure 2. (Alighiero e Boetti, 1978) a series of large-scale biro drawings in varying shades, produced by both men and women of varying ages and socio-economic backgrounds (Boetti, 2001: 36). What we see here is a Latinised alphabet, strewn across the edge of the works—it is through the mutual intelligibility of language that both man and woman scrawl in a palimpsest fashion, issuing text as the common ground for interpretation. It is the forth-rightness of this language and its title I Sei Sensi /The Sixth Sense that offer this key.

Figure 2: I Sei Sensi, Alighiero e Boetti, 1978

The mediation of male and female lie within the sixth sense, if man and woman speak as one—the Latin alphabet acts as premise of ‘sameness’ this voice or (drawing) creates a tongue outwith the sexed body. If this tongue defies logic, or social categorisation; it is then best perhaps viewed as esoteric; in this case it can be viewed as part of the alchemical tradition of androgyny (Boetti, 2001: 76). If men have been classically seen as purveyors of thinking, and women of feeling—the nuance of marks and the manner in which they sit—oscillating in a liminal state, if as Francesco Clemente would suggest, the meeting of two binaries, one paper/tongue transmutes itself as the androgynous language, esoteric in its unification of two bodies (Graham, 2003: 201; Oren, 1995: 97). The presumption of this is that people will try and find an entering point in the bid to find meaning, an esoteric or hidden language (Boetti, 2001: 87). If it is the case that everything means something, what is one saying? Does it even mean anything?

The Scatalogic: Everything/Nothing. It sounds like shit.

When the apophenic in Boetti’s work is the common ground, everything has the potentiality to imply meaning. When it doesn’t, but could be interpreted as doing so, in Boetti’s game plan what does it mean? Is he speaking out his arse? Is it all shit? The prefix of scat- refers to the ancient Greek word for dung/manure, the scatalogical then implies not just a study of faeces but through logos—the logic of shit. Wherein the term itself exclusively designates the archaic to the arena of academia, in the case of the scat prefix being used in a comprehensible or vernacular context the most accessible example is scat music. Brittanica refers to this as a: ‘vocal style using emotive, onomatopoeic, and nonsense syllables instead of words’ (Britannica, 2018).

Scat/Faeces in this case becomes synonymous with NON-SENSE, in essence the physiological principle that head is to brain as anus is to refuse. In referencing previous articulations, I have addressed this issue but wish to extrapolate further by stating that: Boetti’s oeuvre posits a stratagem in which: text is replaced with picture or image with text; an intelligent substitution of an intelligible tongue, where, occassionally; language is chewed, but not fully digested. As they follow along a proverbial digestive tract they become imbalanced and as they lose or gain meaning images and text blurs with pictorial and textual homonyms and homographs.

This is evident in the Figure 3. (Alighiero e Boetti, 1988)—an embroidered tapestry, consisting of a solitary singular abstract plain. This plain is readily akin or interpreted as something like abstract painting. Tutto translates literally as everything, composed of the remnants of past and future works, everything maintains the integrity of their pictorial border, but their forms collapse into nothing: Tutto compounds all with meaning to a zero sum.

Figure 3: Alighiero e Boetti, Tutto, 1988

It is in this matter/manner that everything and nothing gains meaning, and equally it all falls apart. IT then is everything and nothing. If the logic of tongues is present within Mappa del Mundo, Tutto is the logic of the rear end. Everything is musical, perhaps more lewdly related to farting or shitting. Whilst the semblance of figuration or object recognition is eventually recognisable—as their condensation with colour into a solitary abstract plain—when looking at works such as Tutto, this eventual collapse is perhaps best allegorised to the recognition of food remnants in faecal matter.

A criticism of this functionality is that noises deriving from the anus are at least poor. For Deleuze (1990: 190-191) the scatalogic was not like that of the polyphonic (as in the case with the Mappa series) but that its (scatalogic’s) inability to even distinguish a voice rendered it schizophrenic . If the apophenic served to function as a means to decipher, language needs to have an ellipsis in which it seeks time to synthesise speech. It perhaps serves to function in a traditional interpretation of glossolalia in that: the lack of logical sequence or formation mimics the performative aspect of language:

it allows language to exist out of time. To the speaker of tongues, temporality becomes eternity, because there is no logical progression, but also because every moment is an existential beginning. (Csordas, 1990: 28)

Thus, if previous methodologies employed orthodox strategies to deposit or render meaning are now suspended, it is because for the speaker, the glossolalic as positioned by Csordas presents a langue where there is no discernible beginning as there is no end.

What I am ultimately suggesting is one whom talks in ‘traditional tongues’, there is no beginning—as there is no end, so within this logic of the divine, a gravitas of any discernable reason – language in this case, is haemoreged like verbal/pictoral diarrhoea. If language has previously served to function as a means to an end, Tutto is an ellipsis in which it mimics or mimes the notion of speech of the aforementioned works. Acting as a mechanism in which perhaps a true tongue dispenses a codex/index in a flatulent nature to dispense an alphabet as opposed to a decoy or cypher. Eternity then is seen to prevent furthering slippage of meaning but also act as the body in which meaning is generated from.

A CONCLUSION

Deleuze posited that what renders the noise of speech different from that of eating is superficial (Deleuze, 1990: 28). It fails to account for eating whilst speaking, talking and shitting or acts where noises disallow intelligible gestures. If one takes a conservative stance, Boetti could be talking out his ass, although I myself would disagree. One must distinguish in either case if there is meaning or at least intent. I have argued that through three different lexicons Boetti uses strategy in an attempt to transfix meaning onto language. However, if one was to disagree that either articulations of apophenia, glossolalia or the scatalogic were successful in their attempts to do so—if Boetti’s speech becomes incoherent or inarticulate it is determined as such through linguistic and conceptual apparatuses. If socio-cultural inadequacies are responsible for the lack of clarity in deciphering works, the responsibility there lies with the listener/viewer. Whether this sympathy for the orator (artist) is misplaced, it determines though that s/he is not purely speaking out of their ass, or at least that the speaking is potentially in unison with another ‘bodily’ act. If a means of garnering a language or system for deciphering a Logos is positioned akin to the a language of shit, would one say Boetti speaks out his arse? I would argue, no.

In closing, does the form of the apophenic obfuscate the objective entirely? Does the glossolalic truly speak difference towards similitude? Lastly, does/can the scatalogical and its proximity to orthodox interpretations of the glossolalic and its proximity to farting render its function obsolete? Of all three questions, I believe that the glossolalic and apophenic act well and according to their position—in regards to the scatalogical I don’t believe that its function is obsolete—neither do I truly think Boetti speaks out his ass. However, whilst I may not necessarily agree with this sentiment, I’m open towards the interpretation that it may (be shit); and in these cases he may be seen to speak not just shitily but excrement. This positioning, I can concede, would lend itself to the conclusion of that Boetti could be seen to speak out of both orifices of mouth and anus.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beech, D. & Roberts, J. (2002). The Philistine controversy. London: Verso.

Boetti, A. (2001). Alighiero e Boetti. New York, N.Y.: Gagosian Gallery.

Boetti, A. & Cooke, L. (2012). Alghiero Boetti. London: Tate Pub.

Britannica (2018). Scat singing. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/art/scat-music%5BAccessed 9 Apr. 2018].

Csordas, T. (1990). Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethos, 18(1), p.28.

Deleuze, G. (1990) Logic of sense, Boundas, C. (ed.), Lester, M. & Stivale, C. (trans.), Columbia University Press.

Graham, F. (2003). Duchamp & androgyny. Berkeley, Calif.: No-Thing Press.

Hasenmueller, C. (1978). Critical Interpretation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36(3), p.290.

Marder, E. (2016). The Perverse tongue of Psychoanalysis. European Graduate School. Available at: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mQITGywtCI].

Martin, D. (2009). New Testament: an Introduction to History and Literature. Lecture 15: Paul as Pastor. Yale University. Available at: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMVatCd_1xM].

Obrist, H. (2012). One of the most important days in my life. [online] Tate.org.uk. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/one-most-important-days-my-life [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].

Oren, M. (1995). Worlds Envisioned: Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. Third Text, 9(33), pp.95-97.

Smith, J. (2013). The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours. [Blog] The Opinionator, New York Times. Available at: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/why-has-race-survived/ [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].

Steryl, H. (2018). A Sea of Data: Apophenia & Pattern (Mis)Recognition. E-Flux, [online] 73(73). Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apophenia-and-pattern-mis-recognition/ [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].

LIST OF FIGURES:

Figure 1: Boetti, A. 1988, Mappa Del Mundo, tapestry, Monsoon Art Collection, viewed: 20 April 2018, <http://monsoonartcollection.com/alighiero-boetti/&gt;

Figure 2: Boetti, A. 1978, I Sei Sensi, biro on paper mounted on board, Fundació Suñol, viewed: 20 April 2018, <http://www.fundaciosunol.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/italia-ip.jpg&gt;

Figure 3: Boetti, A. 1988, Tutto, tapestry, Christies, viewed: 20 April 2018, <https://www.christies.com/img/lotimages/2011/CKS/2011_cks_07992_0073_000(alighiero_boetti_tutto).jpg>

 

How abstract painting can be read, explained, adjusted and predicted through the study of Bach

 

Bach – Prelude in c minor, BWV 847 played by Glenn Gould, 2017, Water colour on paper, 56.0×56.0cm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkg0aQxsKlU

Da Hee Lee

Introduction

As part of my work I am interested in how abstract painting can be read, explained, adjusted and predicted through the study of Bach using objective indicators and mathematical calculations. I have created a process that translates musical scores into visual scores that I will outline below. First I will examine theoretical elements, then discuss the methodology in terms of the ‘Individualization Process’; then I will present my analysis in terms of its passive and active elements and briefly explain the process of analysis, application and experiment to move to completion; I also briefly touch on my research into forms of notation; finally I assess its outcome and impact. I primarily use Bach’s music to visually explore how something new can be obtained from the music, such as patterns and compositional possibilities. I translate the elements of music to colour, shape, contrast and chromic density, to make a visual score. My process combines objective and subjective undertones of choices to express the sensations of the music rather than provide a one-dimensional translation. So even if it is an abstract picture—with a simple rule it can be read, explained and interpreted. Also, when one listens to another new song, one could predict the composition of the song as an image. Moreover, recently I collaborated with musicians who interpret my scores in an attempt to find new possibilities of performance and recording.

Theory

Music, philosophy and science have fundamentally common roots: this is posited by Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine, Isaac Newton, Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein, who regarded music as an inspiration for their scientific research (Jeong, 2014). Many philosophers, physicists and painters such as Paul Klee believe that music and science are deeply related.

What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be (Klee, 1928).

Bach composed the songs in a mathematical way because he felt that mathematical equilibrium was important and should be taken into consideration when composing based on counterpoint. If the music created by such a procedure is accessed only emotionally or abstractly, it is not a enough to express Bach’s mathematical interest, but it does touch on the artist’s own feelings because of the music.

The scientific methodology of ‘The Art of Fugue’ is similar to that of physics. Bach not only inductively arrived at a general rule from each fact (motif) that was found through research, but also deductively combined (composition) another approach similar to a general rule. To engage in objective individualization for my artwork, I felt it was not enough to express emotions that are ‘instinctively’ heard and felt in order to embody Bach’s music correctly. Because he was approaching it in a scientific way, rather than merely composing sensations, it must be individualised by deductive and inductive reasoning even when expressed visually. Another thing that I considered was that the root of Bach’s music is a mathematical structure and modern people’s intellects are able to unconsciously understand this structure and, therefore, to easily follow the mathematical underpinning in Bach’s approach to music (Joung, 2014). I think that Art should share this emphasis on the importance of objective approaches that we see in creative fields like science and music.

I have also examined how painters have taken music into account with their artworks—sometimes extending into scientific field with Systems Art (Shanken, 2015). Agnes Martin’s musical appreciation of classical composers such as Handel and Beethoven, were closely allied to her work. She wrote that: “Art work that is completely abstract—free from any expression of the environment—is like music and can be responded to in the same way.” For Martin our response to line and tone and colour is the same as our response to sounds. Abstract art is thematic like music and it “holds meaning for us that is beyond expression in words” (Glimcher, 2012). Martin’s art has often been set to music, for example by John Zorn who saw a transcendence in her work, that Martin’s paintings: “glow like magical talismans, healing the world with a message of love, a message of peace” (Dover, 2016).

Methodology—the Individualization Process

As stated to engage with objective individualization, it is not enough to express emotions that are instinctively heard and felt in order to embody Bach’s music correctly. I study the characteristics and background of the music and the philosophy of the composer and play the music. To approach composition in a scientific way, rather than based on sense impressions, it must be individualised by deductive and inductive reasoning when expressed visually: the visualisation must encompass moving from a general to a particular and vice versa to be individualised within a larger structure. The choice of pictorial materials and techniques should be adapted to this understanding of the nature of the music. The process of individualization follows the procedure below so that the mathematical and formalistic traits of Bach’s music are not buried in a subjective ’emotional’ aspect.

Analysis, Application and Experiment/Completion

The first step here is to disassemble and analyse the order, beat, instructions of the performance method, and characteristics of the instrument.  I break this down into two parts:

1. Passive Analysis: Because each player has different ways of interpreting and playing the music, I would follow the interpreting style of one pianist, Glenn Gould, at first.
2. Active Analysis: Play the music to understand how to play notes from the player’s perspective.

This then leads to application. When drawing a single note, the force, position, colour, length, form, and context of the note must all be considered in a comprehensive manner. The labelling criteria cannot be exempted from universal and consistent rules. This then leads to arrangement. Here the layout is determined by a structure that reflects the pattern, flow, and composition of the visually transferred notes. How and where to emphasise and organise the visual parts of the counterpoint must be considered. The next part is experiment moving towards completion. This involves selecting the medium of expression and experimenting with at least three methods to derive the most appropriate result. So the artist ‘s involvement in individualizing music is as follows:

1. Choose music and pianists that are worthy of research and artistic preference.
2. Establish criteria for conversion of melodies into colours (based on synaesthesia).
3. Establish the difference in saturation and brightness of notes.
4. Set the layout of the score, spacing between rows and columns, length of notes per beat.
5. Create all objective rules.

Research into Forms of Notation

Although the aim and objective of my project is different, a study of artists who visualize music in the notation of their scores and create and apply their own consistent rules to express music is of importance. These have included: Iannis Xenakis, and in future I would like to develop this further by consulting the work of Hanne Darboven, Wadada Leo Smith, John De Cesare, Elaine Longtemps, and others.

Xenakis is of particular interest because of his combination of music and mathematics in his book Formalized Music that used graphing techniques related to architectural structures. Lines with a slope of zero are a particular pitch, dotted lines represents discontinuity, a line with a specific measured slope represents a glissando with the pitch getting higher and the line thickness increasing to suggest a crescendo (Anderson, 2011: 197). Glissandi embody Xenakis’ ideas of an underlying unity between music, architecture and mathematics. This enables Xenakis to conceive of sonic shapes—gestalts—analogous to the visible ones and to then to refer them to abstract morphological models. Xenakis invented the UPIC, a machine able to convert graphics into sounds (Iliescu, 2006).

Outcome and Impact

This project’s aim is to disassemble and analyse the order, beat, instructions of the performance method, and characteristics of the instruments to visually explore the aesthetic and sensory qualities that can be explored with Bach’s music. The audience can engage with the pieces of art to understand the complexity and mathematical formulas that Bach has explored in his compositions. As a result of these preoccupations and research, I aim to extract the essence of the music, leaving out the superfluous, as a form of ‘music drawing’. When confining time to the concept of space, the hidden principle of music can be grasped. A new third genre between music and art could be implemented, one that can visually express music in order to make it more comprehensible and appreciated. Through the study of Bach’s music, the aesthetic value of the visual arts is re-examined, the formality is found and the invisible is revealed to demonstrate the significance of the art. As an additional effect, these musical notes, unlike the notes on manuscript paper, allow audiences to read the music while listening to it. The flow and mood of the music piece can be also visually grasped, as this would enable audiences to easily interpret a piece they listen to for the first time, or even notice the differences based on instruments or arrangements. Moreover, the expansion of its function beyond analysis and expression of music would be considered. Hearing impairment individuals would be also be assisted in enjoying music by using ‘colour’ notes.

 

Bibliography

Anderson, Janelle (2011) ‘Xenakis’ Combination of Music and Mathematics,’ The Journal of Undergraduate Research, Vol. 9, https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.co.uk/&httpsredir=1&article=1062&context=jur

Dover, Caitlin (2016) ‘Magic and Peace in John Zorn’s “Music for Agnes Martin”’, Checklist, November 30, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/magic-and-peace-in-john-zorns-music-for-agnes-martin

Glimcher, Arne (2012) Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, Phaidon Press.

Iliescu, Mihu (2006) ‘Glissandi And Traces: A Study of The Relationship Between Musical and Extra-Musical Fields’, In Solomos, Makis et al., (2005) Definitive Proceedings of the “International Symposium Iannis Xenakis” (Athens, May 2005), https://www.iannis-xenakis.org/Articles/Iliescu.pdf

Jongkoo, Jeong (2014) All the Eyes Heard Music, ed. Jisoo Jeoung, Seoul: Naumsa, ch 1, 5. Klee, Paul (1928) Exakter Versuch im Bereich der Kunst [Exact experiments in the field of art], Bauhaus, Vierteljahr Zeitschrift fur Gestaltung, 2, 2-3(1928), 17.

Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis; Olivier. Arts-Sciences: Alloys (Aesthetics in Music Series; No. 2). New York: Pendragon Pr, 1994. Print.

Shanken, Edward A. (ed.) (2015) Systems Art, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

Completion Through Renewal: How did Gordon Matta-Clark and Einstürzende Neubauten use destruction and deconstruction as a critique of modernism?

Dan Brown

In this essay I will examine the relationship between art and architecture to understand how the disciplines of art and music can be used as tools for the critique of modernist architecture. To answer this question, I will be studying the work of the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark and the German band Einstürzende Neubauten, the former being active in New York during the 1970s and the latter in West Berlin from 1980 onwards. I am going to introduce the contextual relationships that these artists had to their urban environment before then explaining how their experiences in these surroundings defined their understanding of the relationship between the ideologies of modernist architecture and power structures in society. I will also be explaining through the work of Bernard Tschumi how both artists used deconstruction and unbuilding in their work to evaluate and challenge modernist theory to open up possibilities for a more autonomous way of living and creating work. This essay will compare both artists to Walter Benjamin’s “destructive character” and analyses their work through his theories of “urban archaeology” and will then explain how the artists used similar principles to evaluate the post-industrial city. This essay concludes with the understanding that both artists juxtaposed the contemporary and historical components of their cities in order to collect the waste elements of both periods to allow for the creation of something new.

Strategies Against Architecture

Matta-Clark’s ideas about collaboration and the uses of space were partially developed whilst he was living as a loft-dweller in one of SoHo’s formerly industrial buildings where the inhabitants cut up and rebuilt disused

workshops to transform them into live-in studios. This required a degree of self-reliance to ensure that studio spaces were divided up to meet changing demands were free to be utilised by the building users, rather than dictated by master architects (Attlee, 2007). Similarly, Einstürzende Neubauten’s environment also provided them with a vision of utopia as an existence comprising of artistic communalism. Their home of Kreuzberg in the early 1980s consisted of a self-reliant network of artists who shared their resources in the form of performance spaces, group members and equipment.

Despite their different locales, both artists were experiencing the effects of post-industrial capitalism, where both of their cities were being subjected to economic recession, government bankruptcy, crumbling infrastructure and increased social tension. These experiences meant that critiquing structures of power was a key component in the work of Matta-Clark and Neubauten, who both theorised a direct relationship between modernist architecture and the oppression of its inhabitants. Le Corbusier was a key reference point for Matta-Clark’s Anarchitecture project because of Corbusier’s belief that the architect should act as a collaborator with elites to form a more structured society. Theoretically this would help to maintain civil order because he believed that “a well mapped-out housing scheme… inevitably imposes discipline on the inhabitants” (Le Corbusier, 1927). Anarchitecture opposed these oppressive ideas, but crucially it did so without promoting a singular solution. One medium of criticism for Matta-Clark came through his fascination with wordplay, which resulted in a series of art cards that brought a literary element to the Anarchitecture project and retaliated against significant modernist theories. “Do not forget the problem of architecture” emphasised Le Corbusier in Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier, 1927). “Anarchitecture attempts to solve no problem” riposted Matta-Clark. (1973) He also played upon Louis Sullivan’s “form follows function”, distorting it into “form fallows function” to emphasise his belief that adhering to set ideas about interactions with a building’s form restricts a person’s potential use of a space. He exemplified an alternative way of designing buildings in the Anarchitecture exhibition with an image of a crashed train carriage that had been given new life as a bridge. By using this image, Matta-Clark suggested that architecture should exist in a way that allows for other, more spontaneous uses.

Alternatively, Neubauten look to the work of Georges Bataille for their understanding of the relationship between architecture and power. Battaille also critiqued architecture as an instrument of control by the wealthy elite, and saw the storming of the Bastille as an attack by the working classes upon their ruling systems (Hollier 1992: 74). Neubauten directly related Battaille’s understanding of the storming on the Bastille to their experiences living in the Haus-Besetzers squatter community, where young artists occupied buildings in areas of Kreuzberg that had been abandoned by business owners and wealthy individuals. This resulted in numerous bloody battles with police who protected the reclaimed property of these powerful figures by violently evicting the squatters. The group reflect upon these experiences on the compilation album titled Strategies Against Architecture III, with a track declaring that “architekur ist geiselnahme” (“architecture is hostage taking”) (Neubauten, 2001). Furthermore, the group’s name translates as “collapsing new buildings”, demonstrating their belief that attacks upon architecture through the understanding of Bataille’s notion of “l’informe” are an attack against a ruling elite.

Bataillean principles were also influential upon deconstructivist architect Bernard Tschumi who recognised deconstruction, as opposed to destruction, as a tool that can be used in architecture to allow for wider structural change. Like Neubauten, He understood that space is political, because it is created by the social structures that occupy it and that the ownership and usage of spaces dictates the morphology of the city. In the essay Space and Events, Tschumi explained that “there is no space without event, no architecture without programme” and that when an event takes place in a space architecture “ceases to become a backdrop to actions, becoming the action itself.” (Tschumi 1994, 149). As a part of his unbuilding, Tschumi looked beyond the discipline of architectural practice to other mediums, including music.

Deconstruction and Unbuilding

Like Tschumi, Neubauten shared an understanding of the relationship between music, architecture and political power and it became a leitmotif throughout their work. Music and architecture are “parallel arts of harmonic and rhythmic order” (Jencks, 2013) that have an equally institutional- reinforcing power that Neubauten’s work intended to subvert. As a visual demonstration of this the back cover of Neubauten’s debut album Kollaps has a photograph depicting the group as urban guerrillas in front of the Nazi symbolism of the Olympiastadion. In the photograph, the group purposefully present their equipment as if it were weapons, ready for an attack upon this structure of power (Muscha, 1984).

Similarly, Matta-Clark also used visual works to suggest plans to take down structures of power in his city. In 1970s New York, the neighbourhood of SoHo operated with a level of autonomy and was a home to numerous artists and musicians much like in Neubauten’s Kreuzberg. However, in 1973 the neighbourhood witnessed the completion of the World Trade Centre, meaning that global finance had a new dominance over the horizon and was asserting its authority upon the surrounding area. Matta-Clark recognised this symbol of capitalism as a threat to his autonomous neighbourhood and proposed an attack upon the towers in a letter to the Anarchitecture group. The work consisted of a sketch of two crossed out towers and the caption:

“THE PERFECT STRUCTURE
(RETURN TO THE INFINATE HORIZON OFF MAN) ERASE ALL BUILDINGS ON A CLEAR HORIZON.”

Matta-Clark’s desire for unbuilding structures like the World Trade Centre resulted from his belief that to take down a structure would create the opportunity to reclaim the space that it had once inhabited. He illustrated this theory with an image chosen for the Anarchitecture exhibition of a building with a sign on the façade of the building stating that space was “available”. The building had been partially destroyed by a gas explosion; meaning that the word “available” had an alternate meaning because a void had been opened up in the urban fabric so this space was ready for reclamation.

When discussing the same ideas of void-making in an interview Neubauten’s vocalist Blixa Bargeld references Walter Benjamin’s essay, Der destructive Charakter (Unkown Director 1986). In the essay Benjamin states that “The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred” (Benjamin, 1931). These theories about void creation and reclamation fuelled one of Neubauten’s most notorious concerts, the 1984 Concerto For Voice and Machinery at the ICA in London. In this performance the band were joined by members of Throbbing Gristle and Fad Gadget to attack the venue’s foundations with a wide array of equipment including saws, drills and cement breakers.

Dadaesque Restructuring

Performances like Concerto For Voice and Machinery were just one way the group challenged the idea of listening to music as a pleasurable experience. The group’s debut LP Kollaps insisted that listeners “Hören Mit Schmerzen” (“Listen With Pain”). Neubauten’s approach to songwriting and recording intentionally altered the conventions of popular music and the group are keen to avoid genre classification with other artists. Despite this, the term “industrial” is frequently applied to their work, which is a genre described by Throbbing Gristle biographer Simon Ford as being “more John Cage than Johnny Rotten.” (Ford, 1999: 14) This can be applied to Neubauten’s work because like Cage and unlike the Sex Pistols, typical song structures of verses, choruses and bridges were discarded in favour of experiments. Despite this, it is worth noting that unlike a lot of music labelled with the industrial tag Neubauten’s work isn’t entrenched in nihilism and obsessions with depravity. Instead, their work presents an open question about the aesthetic prescriptions of music (Fisher, 2005) whilst also as reflecting upon the disharmony of the post-industrial city under capitalism in the attempt to strive for an autonomous way of living.

The group’s aspiration to subvert and disharmonise the conventions of western popular music resonates with Matta-Clark, but in the sense that Matta-Clark achieved this visually, rather than sonically. The disharmony in his work intentionally created a vertigo-enduing experience, resulting in feelings of unease where viewers look with pain. The unease that comes with the circular cuts in these works is a consequence of Matta-Clark violating the perpendicular axes that commonly define architectural space in domestic dwellings. Works such as Office Baroque and Conical Intersect disrupt the conventional relationship between vertical and horizontal by altering the visual forms of architecture, inserting openings strategically to transform the buildings into dadaesque collages and to generate a new kind of urban void in the process.

The Creation and Utilisation of Urban Voids

Both artists’ theories of urban voids being a space for creation were realised in the work of Neubauten, who utilised these spaces to write, record and perform. Their music inhabits the context of two periods of void generation within Berlin’s urban fabric: the voids that depict suffering created by war and terror during the Nazi regime and the voids that illustrate the re-write of history by the westernisation of GDR locations after the fall of the wall (Shryne, 2009: 132). These voids and ruins provided the group with the equipment and spaces for performances, where disused factories, railway stations, bridge cavities and open waste ground became stages. These spaces also provided the band with found objects to utilise; piping, shopping trolleys, sheet metal and rubble were all appropriated into instruments. In the eyes of Benjamin this would make the band “urban archaeologists” living on the margins of consumer culture and recycling the historical ruins of modernity as a form of contemporary critique.

The relationships established between the historical and contemporary in Matta-Clark’s work originated during his architectural education. It’s likely that Colin Rowe, who was a staunch critic of modernism’s tabula rasa approach and was a university tutor to Matta-Clark, initially inspired these ideas in him. In his text The Collage City Rowe proposed the idea of “bricoleur”, which is an approach to urban design formed through a step-by-step progression over time. Rowe views a successful “bricoleur/fox” city as one that uses elements from the older city to inform new additions and interventions in the urban fabric, which is compared favourably to a “engineer/hedgehog” city that dissembles everything and starts again, without evaluating what came before (Rowe, 1978).

Rowe’s principles informed Conical Intersect, where Matta-Clark cut through two buildings slated for demolition that overlooked the Centre Georges Pompidou, which at the time was currently under construction. In interviews regarding the work, Matta-Clark explained how he also drew inspiration from the work of Benjamin like Neubauten to create work that acts as a study upon “the material dialectics of a real environment.” (Lee, 2001: 183). In Passen- Werk (On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress) Benjamin explains that the juxtaposition of the past and the contemporary results in the emergence of the “trash of history” and puts it to use (Smith, 1989). In reference to this, Matta-Clark stated that “only our garbage heaps are growing as they fill up with history” (Diserens, 1977: 360) and that boring through these adjacent buildings he’d allowed the observer to see the modern and historical simultaneously, creating a deliberate “facing off” between the surviving waste of the two, allowing for their re-evaluation.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would argue that both Gordon Matta-Clark and Einsturzende Neubauten were successful in using destruction and deconstruction to evaluate and to then challenge the ideologies of modernist architecture by opening up possibilities for more autonomous uses of space. However, I would also argue that it is evident that their ideas have not had the widespread effects upon the contemporary city as they had desired. Although they are still well known within underground music circles, Einstürzende Neubauten remain an underground act and an isolated case in western “rock” music of a band understanding the relationship between music and architecture and the application of those ideas to attack structures of power. Matta-Clark on the other hand, died of cancer in 1978 aged just 35. If his career as an artist had not been tragically shortened perhaps he may have further developed the Anarchitecture project to a stage where his principles of adaptable spaces would have been realised in the form of inhabited built projects which could have had a greater influence upon wider architectural design. It is worth noting however that there are other artists active today who are taking elements from the practices used by both of the artists highlighted in this essay and are applying them to them to a contemporary context. Musician Holly Herndon along with her collaborator Mat Dryhurst creates a kind of entirely digital musique concrete by using a software patch that produces sounds from the waste elements of web browsers and servers. They have labelled the results as “net concrete” (Shipwright, 2017) because they are comprised of layers of materials collected from the frameworks of the internet “collapsed” on top of each other. This deliberate breaking down of the architecture of the internet by Herndon is the reclamation of online spaces from the powerful and like Neubauten and Matta-Clark she is evaluating and critiquing her environment by collecting its detritus to create something new. Herndon’s vision of utopia also mirrors that of Neubauten and Matta-Clark, with her work she strives to create spaces where “everyone regardless of their background would have agency over their own lives and would feel empowered to build new infrastructures to fit their contemporary conditions” (Pelly 2015).

 

Bibliography

Attlee, James. 2007. “Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier.” Tate Papers No. 7 (blog). 2007. http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate- papers/07/towards-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusier.

Bear, Liza. 1974. “Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting (The Humphrey Street Building).” Avalanche, December 1974.

Benjamin, Walter. 1931. “Der Destruktive Charakter.” Frankfurter Zeitung, November 20, 1931.

———. 1989. “[On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress].” In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Chicago. http://www.rae.com.pt/Benjamin_Methode.pdf.

Bohn, Chris. 1984. “Driller Thriller: Metal Marauders in the Mall.” New Musical Express, January 14, 1984.

Cheng, Mimi. 2015. “PERFECT STRUCTURES Gordon Matta-Clark and the Anarchitecture Project.” https://www.academia.edu/28914679/Perfect_Structures_Gordon_Matta-Clark_and_the_Anarchitecture_Project.

Diserens, Corinne. 1977. “The Greene Street Years.” Gordon Matta-Clark, Exh. Cat., 1992 1977.

Fend, Peter, Dan Graham, and Philip Ursprung. 2010. Gordon Matta-Clark: Moment to Moment:Space. Edited by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Angela Lammertund. Nürnberg: Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nurnberg.

Fisher, Mark. 2005. “K-Punk: NEUBAUTEN’S MESSTHETICS NOW.” April 6, 2005. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005316.html.

Ford, Simon. 1999. Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle: The Story of Coum Transmissions and “Throbbing Gristle.” 01 edition. S.L.: Black Dog Publishing Ltd.

Le Corbusier. 1927. Towards a New Architecture. Connecticut: Martino Fine Books.

Lee, Pamela. 2001. Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. New Ed edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: MIT Press.

Matta-Clark, Gordon. c1973. Note Card No 1153. CCA, Montreal.
Muscha. 1984. Decoder. Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087129/.

Pelly, Liz. 2015. “HOLLY HERNDON AND HER EXPANDING PLATFORM.” The Media (blog). December 15, 2015. http://www.fvckthemedia.com/issue65/holly-herndon.

Rowe, Colin. 1978. Collage City. New Ed edition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Shipwright, Fiona. n.d. “‘What Might Anti-Architecture Mean in the Post-Industrial, Digitised Landscapes of 2017?.’” Architectural Review. Accessed March 20, 2018. https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/what-might-anti-architecture-mean-in-the-post- industrial-digitised-landscapes-of-2017/10019398.article.

Shryne, Jennifer. 2009. “Evading Do-Re-Mi Destruction and Utopia: A Study of Einstürzende Neubauten.” University of Chester. https://chesterrep.openrepository.com/cdr/bitstream/10034/118073/34/jennifer+shryane.pdf.

Smith. 1989. Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. 2nd ed. edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tschumi, Bernard. 1994. Manhattan Transcripts. New edition edition. Sasso Marconi (BO) Italy: John Wiley & Sons.

Unkown Director. 1986. “Nürnberg 1986 Concert Report.” Aspekte. ZDF. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGA1eAIbZXc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Was figurative painting an effective tool that fit into feminists’ strategies?

Miriam Schapiro, 1984, I’m Dancin’ As Fast As I Can

Yeonjoo Cho

In general, figurative painting is regarded as the oldest and the most historic medium throughout art history, from ancient wall painting in caves to contemporary art. However, the concept and context of figurative painting has not been uniform and it often has been changed according to the times. In particular, there were many conflicting opinions on figurative painting among feminist artists in 1970s when subversive and deconstructive art movement against Formalist Modernism were prevalent. While there were many feminist artists who rejected painting advisedly and pursed their feminism with a cross-conventional or an unconventional tool such as performance, video, craft, installation, there were others who asserted that figurative painting was the only appropriate style for feminist artists (Parker & Pollock, 1987: p.5). Though it is hard to deny that one of the most striking achievements of early feminist art was expanding the notion of art by exploring new materials, I want to point out that figurative painting also played a role as a tool that also fit into feminist strategies. Through this essay, I will introduce three different feminists’ ideas on figurative painting from 1970s to 1990s but also find out the answer on those questions: Why did feminist artists have different views on figurative painting? Notwithstanding controversy, how could figurative painting be an effective tool that delivered feminist ideas?

To answer those questions, first of all, I need to explain how the early movement of feminist art began and what its strategies were. Feminist art emerged along with other pluralistic art movements against Modernism. In the 1960s, diverse artistic expressions of political and social criticism were prompted by widespread agitations such as the anti-war movement and the Civil Right Movement in the US, and the student protest in Europe (Tekniner, 2006: p. 42). Since late 1960s, lots of artists and art critics have criticized the claim of Formalist Modernist that art has to ensure its integrity by excluding content and focusing on its physical aesthetic. They argued that art is not a mere self-contained and self-critical activity like Greenberg claimed, and artists have to call attention to content again and manifest a social and political context of artworks (Tekniner, 2006: pp. 41-42).

In the same vein, feminist artists and critics put emphasis on the content of women’s experiences, the social contexts of art works made by women artists, and the political status of women artists. In particular, they pointed out the fact that women artists had been completely marginalised and omitted from the history of Western art. Linda Nochlin’s provocative essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) revealed that most of the so-called genius great artists revered by the canon of Western art are white men. Also, it exposed that the reason for the absence of great women artists was not their innate artistic talents but caused by a social system—such as education, institution, social network, occupation, class, and obviously, gender (Nochlin, 1971). Likewise, In UK, feminist art critics Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock criticised the relationship between female artists and social structure had been different from that of male artists (Parker & Pollock, 1981).

However, the artistic practices and strategies to resist this structural sexism in the art world formed diverse aspects; There was no singular, unitary strategy (Parker & Pollock, 1987: p. 80). This was because feminist art’s resistance against Modernism included a rejection of the idea of a uniform or universal reason which formed the foundation of Modernist Formalism’s aesthetic. In 1970s, what defined feminist art was a political and social consciousness of the different position of women in society, this aimed to resist all forms of women’s oppression, rather than pursing a uniform format (Robinson, 1987: pp. 1-2). As Robinson said by referring to Lisa Tickner’s argument: feminism is a politics, not a methodology (1986, Art Historian Conference in Brighton), “To say that you are a feminist artist, or that you produce feminist art, is to say that your approach to art making is informed by your feminist politics.” Thus, there were numerous types of experimentation and discussions about media to manifest feminist ideas. In specific, feminist artists had a different point of view on figurative painting: first, there were feminist artists who avoided or rejected painting itself while exploring and embracing alternative media; second, some artists produced art works by combining figurative painting and alternative materials and lastly, there were others who held on to figurative painting.

First of all, some feminist artists often used alternative materials that were related to the female gender to create their work, or other media previously little used by men such as performance and video and they tactically avoided traditional media—painting. They wanted to find a new possibility by escaping from the tradition of painting which was already loaded with meanings, both in terms of the connotation of imagery and the social context of the actual practice. In specific, they thought figurative painting was burdened with a male dominant art history: for instance, regardless of its purpose or intent, painting which depicts a figure of naked woman can easily be understood as a voyeuristic representation of the female nude (Parker & Pollock, 1987: p. 5). Although there was a movement for the revival of figurative painting as a tactical opposition to Formalist Modernism in the early 1970s, some feminist artists deliberately refused this tendency for this reason. Rather, their strategy was intervening in existing male dominant art history with new tools which were not considered as traditional media for high art.

Performance became a crucial medium for feminist artists such as Tina Keane who—although she practised as a painter—explained the reason why she became involved in performance in 1974 was it was easily accessible to women; it only needed few resources like props and something to say; it did not need extensive training in specific skills and prescribed materials. It was also more open and enabled an active relationship between artist and audience, which could allow a more collective and social experience (Parker & Pollock, 1987: pp. 39-40). Due to those reasons, performance art stood out as an alternative media for feminist artist in 1970s with a rapid development.

In addition, choosing daily objects as art materials was another remarkable feature among feminist artists. In particular, they used trivial objects, which directly manifested women’s experience and life—such as cosmetics, tampons, linens, and baby clothes. A highly publicized exhibition, entitled ‘Woman’s house’ in 1972 was one of the most important early achievements involving refurbishing a house in Los Angeles with such non-traditional objects. Also, Mary Kelly’s ‘Post-Partum Document’ is another example that utilized daily documentation related to her own experience of childcare as a tool. Through these new materials, the artists shared a goal to express women’s experience in a more direct way. The common strategy of both tendencies was shaping a new aesthetic sensibility that questioned the status quo by radically adopting new media and materials, rather than by sticking with painting.

On the other hand, there were another group of artists who chose nonconventional or cross-conventional materials and applied those to figurative painting since the early 1970s. In many cases, they started their early career as a painter and kept their status, accepting new media and different approaches as feminist artists. Although they tried to find out a new tactic to reveal the oppression of woman by embracing new materials, they did not disregard figurative painting or imagery itself. For instance, Miriam Schapiro, an American feminist artist, who organized the Woman’s House project along with Judy Chicago, incorporated elements of craft (that were often regarded as low art) with feminine imagery. She created her own method of combine painting, ‘femmage’ that applied traditional women’s techniques—sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliqué to achieve her art. Though she made abstract paintings in 1950s, she embraced the decorative style as a positive quality and combined it with imagery to show her identity as a woman artist after a collaborative project with other women artists in 1972 (Peterson, 1997). This was an attempt to resist against an artistic hierarchy that had dismissed decorative craft as an inferior art, often with associations of femininity (Peterson, 1997: p. 22). However, at the same time, her ornate works also grounded with implication to tradition of figurative painting to create new hybrids which could not be marginalized in western fine art history. In Specific, Delacroix and me (Figure 1) manifests Schapiro’s intent to define her work in a tradition of figurative painting, regardless of the explicit decorative style with lots of patterns and flower embroideries. Also, I’m Dancin’ As Fast As I Can (Figure 2) shows certain representations of figures and a well-balanced combination of fragments of vibrant fabrics and colourful acrylic paints, which is based on her ‘femmage’ technique.

In the same manner, Faith Ringgold—who also participated Woman’s House project—used a similar strategy to reveal her female identity by combining canvas and quilting fabric and appropriating well-known figurative paintings considered as masterpieces in Western art history. In one of her well-known works, for instance, Picnic at Giverny (Figure 4), she deliberately attached a fabric border to acrylic painting in order to show her inclination to oppose to the hierarchy of genre between craft and fine art. However, by mentioning Giverny—which reminds us Monet—as a title and implying Manet’s (1862) Luncheon on the grass with a naked little Pablo Picasso, she showed her marginalised identity as a Black woman artist and alluded the mainstream of Western art tradition sarcastically and humorously (Graulich & Witzling; 1994). Both artists, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Ringglod kept a position as a painter with experimentations of a new artistic language by embracing political and social contexts of alternative materials related to craft.

Last but not least, there were feminist artists who tried to find the possibilities of the figurative tradition in the 1970s. They focused on potentials of figurative paintings that allowed them to deliver certain contents directly related to their own point of view and life experiences. Moreover, in order to disrupt the dominance of modernist painting and to subvert the belief that art must be pure and universal, they thought the use of figuration is needed (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 39). Unlike other feminist who explored new artistic practices with nonconventional media, they believed that a form of figurative painting that was sympathetic to women could be an effective tool to fight against dominant paintings which degrade or exploit the image of women. For example, American painter, Marjorie Kramer defined feminist painting as a painting which does not exploit but reaches out to people, especially women, with a communicated truth (Kramer, 1971). She claimed that “Feminism doesn’t share a quality with Abstract art and the images in a feminist painting have to be socially legible, that is, recognizable. Figurative” (Kramer, 1971). In addition, Monica Sjoo rejected a concept of abstract art and emphasized the necessity to return to figurative painting, claiming that “abstract art is a means of communication in our hands to sit around playing games with surface reality” (Sjoo, 1972: p. 4). These artists focused on figurative painting with various methods, such as representation of female body, manifestation of women’s experience, and implication of narratives.

Monica Sjoo, a precursor of feminist painting, showed her infamous painting, God giving birth (Figure 5)’ in 1973 exhibition ‘Womanpower’ at London’s Swiss Cottage Library. This painting explicitly depicted a non-white goddess giving birth with nudity to celebrate women’s creativity and potential power. And this figuration of goddess effectively reclaimed the concept of female nude that was usually regarded as an object of sexual desire from male artists and audiences. For feminist painters, showing women-centred, positive image was a tactic to challenge sexually, idealized or stereotyped representations of women. And this tendency was also continued through following exhibitions such as ‘Women’s images of women’ (1977) and ‘Woman-magic’ (1978) (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 39).

However, since the 1980s, feminist painters have expressed more complex and multifaceted ideas and ambivalent emotions about the gendered body, women’s sexuality, childbirth and motherhood (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 42). Unlike early pioneers of feminist art, younger artists like Eileen Cooper and Amanda Faulkner implied their identity and their own distinctive experiences through less straightforward images, colours, compositions and more painterly expression: they did not tactically choose a positive or negative image of women. Over a period of time, there was recognition of other woman painters who were comparatively isolated but had continuously pursued issues of womens’ experiences and narratives such as Paula Rego and Evelyn Williams. The common aspects of these figurative painters are: accepting and expressing their experiences of difference as a crucial theme to their work, not as a separate, uneasy fact which they have to get rid of; embracing conventional figuration as their artistic language while choosing a themes which were not considered as important issues; rather than using explicit imagery or propaganda, they alluded to certain narratives related to the female figure (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 44). These multi-layered feminist figurative paintings, produced by these artists have inspired younger generations, forming the new aesthetic from women’s points of view, which was misunderstood and neglected in Western Art history.

Conclusion

Thus, considering all those diverse explorations on media and different strategies, it is clear that those three groups of artists recognized the importance and potential influence of figurative painting even though they chose different strategies to pursue their feminist ideas. In comparison with the radical feminist artists who aimed to criticize the hierarchical system of art world itself and to formulate a new arena for women by using alternative media, feminist figurative painters intended to expose their existences and raise their own voices in the existing system of art world. As a result, both efforts were equally important and it is hard to say there is only one strategy which is effective for the feminist project. As I mentioned earlier, feminist art cannot be defined by unitary criteria, but, it shares the common goal of “influencing cultural attitudes and transforming stereotypes” as Susan Lacy declared. Figurative painting as a feminist medium provided a diversity to intervene or change overly dominant masculine values by adopting the most conventional and authoritative media, figurative painting itself and reclaiming its power for women. That was the most powerful strategic impact that figurative painting had. Thus, based on this aspect, figurative painting played an important role and made a great achievement by representing images made from a women’s point of view. Although the political effectiveness of figurative painting was ignored among some feminist artists and critics, the impact of figurative painting to feminist project should not be devalued any more.

 

Bibliography

Books

Pajackowaska, C & Carson, F. (2000) Feminist Visual Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Parker, R & Pollock, G. (1987) Framing feminism: art and the women’s movement 1970-1985. London: Pandora.

Parker, R & Pollock, G. (1981) Old Mistresses. London: Pandora.

Robinson, H. (2015) Feminism, art, theory: an anthology 1968-2014. 2^nd edn. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.

Robinson, H. (1987) Visibly Female. London: Camden Press.

Journal Articles & Essays

Brodsky J & Olin F. (2008) Stepping out of the Beaton Path: Reassessing the Feminist Art Movement. Signs [Online], Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 329-342 Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521062 [Accessed: 22-02-2018]

Graulich, M & Witzling, M. (1994) The Freedom to Say What She Pleases: A Conversation with Faith Ringgold. NWSA Journal [Online], Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 1-27 Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316306 [Accessed: 16-04-2018]

Kramer, M. (1971) Some Thoughts of Feminist Art. Women and Art. No.1, p. 3.

Peterson, T. (1997) Miriam Schapiro: An Art of Becoming. American Art [Online], Vol. 11, No.1. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109259 [Accessed: 11-03-2018]

Sjoo, M. (1972) Images of Womanpower, Art Manifesto, in Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art. No.1.

Nochlin, L. (1971) Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Art News [Online]. Available from: http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/30/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists %5BAccessed: 21-03-2018]

Tekiner, D. (2006) Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning. Social Justice, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2014), Art, Power, and Social change, Available from: http://www.jastor.org/stable/29768369 [Accessed: 22-02-2018]

Webpages
“How Did Feminist Art Begin? A Brief History of Women Rejecting Patriarchy in the Art World” Available from: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/how-did-feminist-art-begin-a-brief-history-of-women-rejecting-patriarchy-in-the-art-world-55016 [Accessed: 01-03-2018] “Feminist Art Movement Overview and Analysis”
Available from: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-feminist-art.htm# [Accessed: 21-03-2018]

 

 

 

Can places be considered ‘inalienable objects’, and how do they operate in connection with imagination?

Nikki Kane

This essay will examine notions of place and their relation to imagination, in connection with the idea of ’inalienable objects’ in material culture—that is objects that are imbued with value and identity from their owners or uses which goes beyond material or commodity value. By analysing place through the lenses of imagination and object, I will consider how place operates in connection with myth and aura, and examine whether places can be considered as objects when they become sites for the projection of imagined identity. This analysis will draw on the work of Tuan (1979) as a starting point to define place and articulate its location in imagination, and will then go on to examine this in connection with wider considerations of place within the imagination in relation to Weiner (1992) and the idea of the ‘inalienable object’.  Tuan (1979: 6) outlines many aspects of these concepts, beginning with a distinction between the two terms that will be followed in this essay. Space can be considered abstract and open, something of potential and allowing movement, where place has some sort of value. The two are noted as being connected in that space can become place through experience and familiarity, and that to create these definitions we need both—understanding the stability and value of place through the openness of space and vice versa.

This connection that place has with value and experience could explain the relationship it shares with the imagination, but this relationship is one that depends on both concepts of space and place: the connection with imagination relies on place value yet also requires some vagueness or potential. In Imagined Communities, Anderson notes this balance of familiarity and unknown when he describes how imagined places came to operate between the year 1500 and 1800.This included the developments in cartography, shipbuilding, printing and navigation and making this imagining a possibility, and that by creating this knowledge of other lands or communities but without too much detail, imaginings of these places were able to develop (Anderson, 2006: 188). Similarly, this balance of familiarity and unfamiliarity as creating potential for imagination is commented on in descriptions of California and the dream of the American West, seeing this only being possible from a distance, and with a “haze” being required to blur the perspective and in turn the reality of the making of this landscape and dream (Mitchell, 2003: 13-14). In a similar way, Gibellini has described place as “an event”: rather than something static that exists outwith our presence, it can be considered something in movement that is in progress and something that we come across and are involved in (Gibellini, 2011).

From these accounts then, we can begin to develop an understanding of the connection place has with imagination and note the role that space plays in this. If we examine this alongside Tuan’s definitions of the two concepts, we could then continue to locate imagination, describing it as operating somewhere between space and place, at a point between familiarity and potential. Following from this ‘locating’ of imagination, we can now begin to examine this relationship with place more closely, and consider how this connection operates. We can consider the role of myth in this relationship and begin to look at places as myths, and myth within place. The success of myths involves a limited knowledge, and while we have a high level of geographic information available to us, this is held collectively, and the knowledge that we hold as individuals is limited by our experiences, allowing myth of place to develop within our own realms (Tuan, 1979: 85). This construction of mythical place operates on psychological and intellectual levels, and is a fundamental aspect of human imagination. It allows us to add “personality” to locations and aid our navigation and understanding of place, and allow parts or aspects to symbolise a whole set of ideas or values (Tuan, 1979: 99-100).

In his analysis of the “Blue Guide”, Barthes also ties his study of myth to the idea of place.   Here we begin to see the role of myth as a reducing one, one that takes this function of symbolising values to a limiting effect. This account describes how a series of travel guides has used the tools of myth to reduce complex and layered landscapes to simple, picturesque qualities and features. This suggests a fine line between the use of myth as a tool or repository for us to explore and articulate our values, and as a function to simply limit or dilute these values or experiences to a number of icons or signs. Here, he touches on the idea of place in constant movement, as something not-fixed that we have seen with Gibellini, but describes this in connection with this limiting mythology as creating disappearance rather than something in flux (Barthes, 1993: 74-77).

As we have seen in Mitchell’s notes on California, the American landscape provides a suitable setting for considering this role of imagination. In The American Geographies, we can see this explored in a way that connects with Barthes’s description of myth of place and consider the idea of the American geography as “homogenized” (Lopez, 1989: 52). The presences of this landscape in the media, seen on television and in photographs, has developed this understanding of it as scenery, where it’s intrinsic depth, variety and “wildness” have reduced to images that symbolise nature or adventure, much like the “Blue Guides” of Barthes (Lopez, 1989: 52). Of course though, with a landscape so layered, as with any place really, we cannot know if fully and myth and imagination are ways of making sense of these complex environments. While we inhabit these places or travel to and in them, we do in many ways also live in the idea of them (Lopez, 1989: 61).

Many of these ideas connect with much study of the imaginary. This can be examined through the work of many thinkers and writers, many of whom have discussed the imaginary in relation to ideas of the ‘real’ and of our perception of the world. Whilst this draws on much thinking and philosophy on periphery areas, summary research on the ideas of the imaginary and place has developed this notion that as we experience and navigate the world through our perceptions, in many ways we inhabit and interact with a world that is ‘imaginary’, distinct from a static or neutral world that exists that we in turn attach our significance to (Lennon, 2003: 5-6). Gibellini also begins to describe the process that we take in our attachment to place and its connection to our imaginations and selves, noting the “internally conceived world” and our attempts to “appropriate” place to relate it to our own experiences and ideas (Gibellini, 2011), and we can also begin to think of how place operates as part of a personal cosmology (Tuan, 1979: 88).

To develop this analysis, we can consider the idea of these personal cosmologies or worldviews in connection with objects, as these too are ways in which we use parts to signify values and make use of myth. These ideas can be discussed in relation to material culture and material anthropology, and in particular by examining the concept of “inalienable objects”. These inalienable objects are objects that have a value beyond their commodity value, which is acquired when they become ‘authenticated’ through their cosmological association. This authentication involves instilling these objects with the identity of their owner, often through personal experiences or associations with held ideals or interests. These objects act as repositories for these personal values, and the experiential attachment to them also allows them to be used to mythologise these ideas (Weiner, 1992: 6, 11; Miller, 2011: 90).

These ideas can be connected to our previous understandings of myth, and also to Benjamin’s notion of “aura” in connection the changing values that can be attached to an object over times and settings, as in his description of the changing, loaded values attached to classical sculpture throughout history (Benjamin, 1994: 300). Aura is also related to the ideas of distance we have considered, and is also discussed in relation to natural phenomena. Here, we can connect this to the noted descriptions of the California landscape, in Benjamin’s definition of the aura as a distance, regardless of actual proximity (Benjamin, 1994: 300). This links with our idea of place in the imagination and the necessary and constant vagueness of place that fosters this.

This notion of aura then can be tied to our ideas of inalienable objects and in turn place. This changing attachment of value can be seen in inalienable objects can be seen in their very definition as objects whose significance is based outwith their use or commodity value, and the distance associated with aura is present here in the separation from use. If we develop this to connect with the ideas of place and imagination that we have begun to explore, we can see that these too involve this sense of detachment, and that they make important use of this changing value to operate within our personal cosmologies and at times to become mythologised images that signify simplifies values.

This then leaves us to consider the connection between place and the imaginary, and this concept of inalienable objects. We have seen then how objects can both hold values of personal experience and ideals, and help articulate and express these values. We have also noted how the idea of distance operates within this, where the attached significance is developed through personal authentication and is separate to the original value of the object as a commodity. In many ways this is very similar to the role that place plays within the imagination. We have seen that place too is closely connected to personal cosmologies and our development and articulation of these, and that this is in many ways connected to wider thinking about perception and reality. The notion of distance is also of particular note here, in that it is intrinsically connected to how place operates within imagination: it can involve both a separation from the complexity of landscape, and involves the limited knowledge that is required for this imagining to flourish. While there are many clear connections between these ideas and those of the inalienable objects, we could say that the analysis of these objects operates as an illustration rather than a comparison that fully explores these ideas within place.

It can be seen that in many ways places do operate as a form of inalienable objects within our imaginations, in their connections with value that we have examined. However, we could suggest that the role of place within imagination and of mythical place is more layered and complex than the illustration of inalienable objects allows. As well as holding personal values, place, and particularly in connection with myth, connects to collective value too. It operates on this personal level, yet also has the potential hold and project collective myth. As we have noted in our consideration of definitions of space and place alongside imagination, the balance between familiarity and vagueness or potential is key, and we could say that it is precisely this combination that allows place to occupy such a layered position within our experiences of the world.

By examining the concepts of space and place through definitions and in connection with the imagination, we have seen then that this relationship is a particularly full one. We have noted that, based on our definitions of ‘space’ and ‘place’ the imagination appears to occupy a location somewhere between then two, making use of the familiarity and knowledge of place and the potential and openness of space. In this relationship with imagination, we have also seen that the ideas of myth and aura are helpful in understanding how place and imagination operate both within our personal and collective associations. Perhaps most helpfully, we have also seen how place and the imaginary are key to developing and expressing our personal cosmologies and experiences of the world, and have illustrated this through the ideas of inalienable objects. Through these examinations and illustrations then we can suggest that to a certain extent place acts as an inalienable object within the imagination in connection with personal worldview, but that the location of the imagination between space and place leads to a much more complex and layered relationship of the imaginary place.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities Verso, London.

Barthes, Roland (1993) Mythologies Vintage, London.

Benjamin, Walter (1994) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Art in modern culture: an anthology of critical texts (eds. Frascina, Francis and Harris, Jonathan) Phaidon, London.

Gibellini, Laura F. (2011) A Place, Constructed, http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/12162/12163

Lennon, Kathleen (2003) Imaginary Bodies and Worlds, University of Hull, Hull.

Lopez, Barry (1989) “The American Geographies” in Orion magazine, Autumn 1989, pp. 52-61.

Miller, Daniel (2011) “Designing Ourselves” in Design Anthropology (ed. Clark, A.J.), Springer-Verlag, Wien.

Mitchell, Don (2003) The Lie of the Land: Migrant workers and the California Landscape University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Tuan, Yi-Fu (1979) Space and Place: the perspective of experience University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Weiner, Annette B. (1992) Inalienable Possessions: the paradox of keeping-while-giving, University of California Press, Berkeley.

The Gift and the Ghost: Value and Exchange in Contemporary Art

Alex Stursberg

How do we define value when an artwork is not for sale? Is it possible for artists to circumvent the marketplace? If so, what would the social implications of this act be? Hosting, trading, and gifting are key methods that artists have used to challenge modern exchange-based value systems. Rather than produce a sellable object, artists have highlighted the social and cultural values that exists within these acts. In contrast to the alienating nature of monetary exchange, these alternative forms of exchange offer artists an effective method for redefining value outside of the marketplace. Through an analysis of theories by Max Weber, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, and Jacques Derrida and an examination of artworks by David Hammons, Jimmie Durham, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rikrit Tiravanija, and Del Hillier, I will discuss the relationship between art, value, and exchange. Through my research, I examine the nature of monetary value and how capital-based exchange impacts on social relations while considering value in terms of the art market. I illustrate alternative exchange practices in contemporary art, including trading, hosting, and gifting. These case studies provide examples of how through the facilitation of artworks based on alternative modes of exchange, we can reorient ourselves towards value and resist the alienating nature of commodification.

How the Nature of Capital Transformed Value in Society

The value of an artwork is often defined through its relationship to capital and the marketplace. To examine how we define value when an artwork is not for sale, we must first examine how we understand value itself, and the system under which the art market operates. Capitalism is a system through which impersonal relations and objects replace personal relations of dependence. Under this system, the acquisition of capital becomes the end goal, overturning other social aspirations (Lowy, 2002: 77). In comparing the theories of Marx and Weber, Michael Lowy identifies two key elements within this economic system: first, capitalism inverts “means and ends” whereby the acquisition of more money, rather than the satisfaction of our actual needs, becomes our ultimate objective. Second, capitalism requires that we submit our lives to an “all powerful” economic mechanism through which we accept production and gains as the key factors that shape our lives. In a sense, capitalism “imprisons” us as it determines what we are able to do. By placing exchange value above human relations, capitalism places money at the center of social interactions (Lowy, 2002: 83-86). Thus, while capital allows for a clear-cut and calculable method of transaction, in accepting its primacy we become disconnected from the value of others and the objects they create.

Simmel (2004, 76-79) explains that by determining value through comparison with other objects, monetary exchange removes objects from the context of their creation and allows their value to be determined independent of their possessors. Monetary exchange, and the social relationships that develop from it are just a one-time interaction. These interactions are considered alienating in the sense that they don’t oblige the participants to develop their relationship any further than the transaction itself (Carrier, 1991: 130). Exchange through gift or trade, on the other hand, can enhance social relationships, as it involves an element of obligatory reciprocity. One is morally obliged to repay what they have received. They are expected by society to reciprocate with an object of mutual value (Carrier, 1991: 129). As described by Mauss, the objects that are exchanged are “inalienable” as they are an extension of the self, representing the person who is giving them and connecting them directly to the recipient (Carrier, 1991: 125). Through the act of gift exchange participants become further interconnected.

Exchange practice in pre-state societies established value through a complex and “inalienable” web of social interaction that employed various forms of trade and gift. For example, much research has been invested into dissecting the Aboriginal “Potlatch”, a ceremonial feast in which gifts are exchanged through the redistribution of resources. Mauss explains that this activity created an “interlocking whole” whereby gifting cemented social dependency and interaction, while obligating participants to reciprocate gifts in an appropriate manner (Carrier, 1991: 129). The “Potlatch” is often pointed to as evidence of our natural tendency to pursue harmonious forms of exchange. The loss of this fundamental element of our human nature has transformed how we understand value.

How Value and the Art Market Intersect

The art market itself is also a key player in shaping how we understand value in relation to artworks. A particularly complex and hysterical market dealing in a particularly unique commodity, the art market requires its own economic considerations. Marxist theory argues that artists living under capitalism are beholden to commodification, which determines what they will create. The art object possesses the same qualities as any commodity that can be bought or sold and has both a “use value” and an “exchange value” (Wilette, 2010). While the art objects “use value” may not be as clear as with many other objects, it has the capability to satisfy a variety of personal motivations, from pure pleasure to social status. On the other hand, the “exchange value” of the art object is clearer and can often take precedence. For many, an artwork’s primary value lies in what it can be exchanged for, or what amount of money can be obtained from it. However, the art object is a special kind of commodity: the exchange value of artworks operates differently than the more comparable and utilitarian objects exchanged within everyday economics. The art market is perhaps most similar to the stock market, with its tendency to fluctuate, its coded languages, and its highly speculative nature (Carter, 2006: 105). For the outsider, it is a more veiled and complex market than most.

David Hammons’ 1983 performance piece, Bliz-aard Ball Sale parodies the often times absurd nature of value within the art market. Portraying himself as an anonymous peddler, Hammons situated himself alongside other street vendors in downtown Manhattan and offered snowballs for sale to the public. He arranged and priced the snowballs according to size from small to large (Stern, 2009). Through attaching a price to a commonplace and short-lived object, Hammons questions how we determine value. It is a commentary on the capitalist and often arbitrary nature of the art world, as well as a critique on the nature of class in America. Like the snowballs, many American citizens are subjected to the same arbitrary evaluations. In the case of the snowballs, it is their size that matters and in America it is ethnicity and class (Busch, 2014). Hammons, whose work is largely about how he functions in the world, has stated: “The less I do the more of an artist I am” (Stern, 2009). For him, true art lies in the act of removing oneself. When his sale is over, Hammons and his snowballs melt away.

Simmel (2004: 70) contends that aesthetic value is often difficult to quantify, as its use value is often unclear. We find may find utility in how the object makes us feel, or if it provides us with an enjoyable sensation. However, the art object is unique in the sense that it has an independent existence that cannot be replaced by that of another. Economic exchange demands that objects be evaluated in comparison to one another and this makes the independent art object particularly difficult to quantify. Under capitalism, the sellable object must have value independent of the person possessing it whereas artworks are intrinsically linked to their creators, and at times their possessors (Simmel, 2004: 70-79). Perhaps it is these factors that make the relationship between art and capital seem so insidious at times. With no alternative, we force artworks to fit within this system, which disconnects us from the motivations for their creation. With monetary gain as the ultimate calculation of value, there is no need for a relationship between the producer and consumer.

Jimmie Durham’s artworks often make a consideration around what our relationship to art objects and materials has become under capitalism. Anti-monumental and in defiance of the elevated art object, Durham’s works such as Stone as Stone remind us of the value of an object, free from economic consideration. In these works, Durham employs large stones to smash traditional objects used in art preservation such as a vitrine. In doing so, he highlights the utility of the stone itself. For Durham, the stone tool is an example of human genius as it’s utility is always present. It is a fantastic hammer. There is clear use value in a stone (Durham, 2010). Yet a more recent work by Durham may defy commodification completely. In 2010, in collaboration with Cujo Magazine, Durham amassed 1000 separate objects, described as “magic items that hold the world together”. These objects were then photographed and reproduced in a 1000 page publication and were then gifted to 1000 different people along with one of the objects. The recipient is given one part of a whole that they must keep and care for, knowing that alongside 999 other people, they are helping to hold the world together (Durham, 2010). Through a simple act of generosity, Durham challenges our understanding of value, while reminding us of our interdependence as humans.

A Guest + A Host = A Ghost

The desire to counteract capitals’ monopoly over our value systems and redefine our relationship to the commodified art object has offered fertile grounds for artistic exploration. Hospitality, in a variety of forms, has emerged as a preferred method employed by different artists to circumvent the art market. In 1953, at artist Bill Copley’s Parisian vernissage, Marcel Duchamp offered small candies as gifts to visitors. Each candy wrapper was inscribed with the Duchampian pun: A Guest + A Host = A Ghost. While various levels of interpretation can be drawn from his wordplay, Duchamp is referring to what remains after an act of hospitality. Through gift exchange we break down social barriers; the guest (the visitors) and the host (Duchamp) form a new entity (the ghost), which is an amalgamation of these two players and hints at the bonds that are formed through this act. Through the gift, the hosting artist finds their individuality removed from their work. What remains is the spirit of the act of exchange itself, or the ghost of a human relationship (Gould, 2000).

Felix Gonzalez-Torres employed a similar methodology to Duchamp with his candy-pile artworks of the early 90’s. His work, Untitled (Portrait of Marcel Brient) consisted of 198.5 pounds of candies wrapped in light blue cellophane piled in the corner of a gallery that was offered to visitors to eat. By inviting participants to consume his artwork, Gonzalez-Torres was questioning the relationship between value, exchange, and art. Where did the artwork lie? Was it within the candy pile itself? Or was it in the hospitable act of exchange between Gonzalez-Torres and his visitors? It posed an important question around value. With no object for sale, we are forced to reorient ourselves around where the value lies within the work (Foster, 2011: 654). But the art market has an incredible ability to reassert an artworks exchange value as its primary value. Gonzalez-Torres, who died in 1996, might not have anticipated that in 2010 his certified specifications for Untitled (Portrait of Marcel Brient) would sell for over 4.5 million dollars (Phillips, 1992).

Rikrit Tiravanija’s artworks seek to take hospitality a step further than candy through the act of serving meals. He is best known for his performances in which he sets up a kitchen in a gallery and remains for the duration of the exhibition, acting as both cook and host (Heartney, 2013: 402). In his 1992 exhibit, Untitled (Free) Tiravanija moved all the unseen rooms of the gallery into public spaces, placing the gallery workers in the main space, while in the back gallery he set up his kitchen and served Thai curry with rice. In reversing the space, he sought to dislocate the conventional positions of the artist and gallery worker and created a social consideration that can’t be quantified by capital (Foster, 2011: 665). Food reminds us of our basic human needs. Through this hospitable gesture Tiravanija reconnects us to the objects that shape our lives.

Derrida (2000: 25) argues that true hospitality should be “unconditional” or “absolute”. In the traditional hospitality scenario, the host offers gifts with expectations of a return or benefit. Therefore the host is in a position of power, whereby they allow the guest to be hosted so long as the guest meets their conditions. Derrida employs the example of immigration and the expectations that the host country places on immigrants. For example, many countries expect that immigrants will succumb to a certain degree of cultural assimilation before they are fully welcome (Derrida, 2000:15). Unconditional hosting seeks to remove power dynamics from hosting completely through an “unquestioning welcome”. To achieve absolute hospitality we must open up our homes to the “anonymous other” without the expectation of a return. This can create what Derrida calls “generative hospitality”, whereby the actions of the host will produce more of the same (Derrida, 2000: 25). True hospitality requires that we allow ourselves to become ghosts within the act, both parties anonymous, and without debt. It breaks down social barriers between public and private, foreigner and resident, and challenges our orientations towards value. It requires that we recognize social value ahead of monetary gain.

Canadian artist, Del Hillier is conscious of the importance of unconditional hospitality. His ongoing project The Trading Post picks up on these themes by creating a self-sustaining “space of exchange” (Rake, 2014: 12). Hillier began his project by finding an abandoned and run down cabin near a main highway in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Hillier repaired the cabin and filled it with a variety of items, including books, t-shirts, games, and various other objects. He then hung a “Trading Post” sign on the cabin, along with a list of guidelines for using the space, requesting that items be replaced by something else of the traders choosing, and that all trades were written down as documentation of the activity. Returning once a year since its inception, Hillier has discovered that The Trading Post has taken on a life of its own. New items appear and disappear, documentation of the trading continues, and participants have even begun performing their own repairs on the space (Rake, 2014: 12-14). His project is a strong example of effective unconditional hosting and demonstrates how artists can facilitate rather than create, ceding control over their artworks ultimate outcome. The Trading Post no longer needs Hillier to survive. Instead it has developed into a self-sustainable community project, dependent on all its players to become whole. The relationship between Hillier and the traders is unknown and Hillier is simply the host that initiated the exchange. Like Duchamp’s pun, together they become ghosts. Through “generative hospitality”, Hillier’s act results in more of the same and is paid forward by the other traders. Hillier has created an invisible relationship between strangers, who become accountable not only to the act of exchange, but also to each other (Rake, 2014: 14). Indeed, The Trading Post is a good example of how when we free objects and artworks from monetary evaluation, we can truly appreciate their cultural and social value.

Generating Hospitality

Capitalism demands that all objects, artworks included, are beholden to evaluations that disconnect us from each other in myriad ways. It causes us to place monetary value ahead of cultural and social value, while alienating us from objects and each other. How can we challenge this dilemma? Can the non-commodified artwork alter our understanding of value? Artists have employed a variety of strategies to investigate these questions, including gifting, trading, and hosting. But as the example of Gonzalez-Torres’ candy piles displays, it is often difficult for artworks to completely resist commodification. Thus, unconditional hospitality is an important methodology as it resists commodification by seeking to completely remove power dynamics from the act of exchange. Through a variety of humble methods we can see how small gestures can effectively challenge capitals’ dominance over our lives, alter our orientations towards value and exchange, and reconnect us to our basic human nature. Through increasing, encouraging, and nurturing the act of unconditional hospitality we may find these methods become even more potent and generate more of the same.

References

Busch, Thomas (2014) ‘Can You Remove the Rainbow From Happening? I EnArt, December.

Carrier, James (1991) ‘Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange,’ Sociological Forum, Vol. 6, No. 1, March 1991, pp. 119-136.

Carter, Michael (2006) Reframing Art, Berg Publishers: Oxford.

Derrida, Jacques (2000) Of Hospitality Cultural Memory in the Present, Stanford: California.

Durham, Jimmie (2010) The Usual Song and Dance Routine With a Few Minor Interruptions, Glasgow School of Art, Lecture Series, Video, http://www.gsa.ac.uk/life/gsa-events/events/j/jimmie durham/#Jimmie%20Durham%20Video).

Durham, Jimmie (2011) ‘1000 Magic items Hold The World Together,’ CUJO, Issue 3, November, http://www.cujoguide.com/en/issues/3/

Foster, Hal et al. (2011) Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Vol 2, Thames & Hudson: New York.

Gould, Stephen Jay (2000) The Substantial Ghost: Towards a General Exegesis of Duchamp’s Artful Wordplays Tout-Fait, Vol. 1, Issue 2, May, http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/gould.html.

Heartney, Eleanor (2013) Art & Today, Phaidon, London.

Lowy, Michael (2002) ‘Marx, Weber and the Critique of Capitalism,’ Logos 1.3, Summer, pp. 77-86.

Phillips Art Auctions (1992) Untitled (Portrait of Marcel Brient) Felix Gonzalez-Torres, https://www.phillips.com/detail/FELIX-GONZALEZ-TORRES/NY010710/4

Rake, Peta (2014) ‘Trading Hosts: Del Hillier’s The Trading Post,’ C Magazine, Vol. 124, Winter, pp. 10-14.

Simmel, Georg (2004) The Philosophy of Money, Routledge: New York.

Stern, Steven (2009) ‘A Fraction of the Whole’, Frieze, No. 121, March, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/a_fraction_of_the_whole/

Willette, Jeanne (2010) Marxism, Art and the Artist Art History Unstuffed, June, http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/marxism-art-artist/

From Feminized Flora to Floral Feminism: Gender Representation and Botany

Kelly McLeod

This essay investigates how women and botanical subjects have come to signify each other and been exploited through processes of marginalization by patriarchal capitalist systems, as well as how women have reclaimed their identities by altering the dialogue in botanical metaphor. Language and classification systems in Eurocentric cultures have applied gender binary thought to nature, characterizing it as feminine. The idea that women and nature are not only linked, but inferior to the binary opposition of the masculine and the logical has been reinforced by botanical metaphor, Linnaean taxonomy, and other sign systems. This division of power has enabled the exploitation of women and nature based on capitalist myths of exchange and sign value, and the subversion of other values which exist outside of capital interest. Women’s bodies and nature’s resources have been commodified, aestheticized, and sexualized for the purpose of capital gain within an ocular-centric society, where prioritization of the beautiful conceals complex identities and agency. The presentation of plants as performative botanical subjects in gardens and scientific illustrations conceals their native contexts, creating a decontextualized understanding of man’s relationship to nature (one of cultivator/cultivated), and by extension to femininity. I will be focusing on how 17th to 19th century gender politics have affected modern science and philosophy, using feminism as a methodology and gender theory analysis. By applying more contemporary insights to the way in which the past is understood, it becomes easier to recognize the systems and processes by which nature and women have come to be associated and oppressed. I would also like to show how many women have reversed some of the hurtful gendered stereotypes by engaging in the dialogue of femininity and reclaiming the botanical metaphor as s symbol of strength and knowledge.

European science, industrialization and capitalism all rely on myth and the reductionist world view to create hierarchical divisions of knowledge and power within their systems. In the sciences, these systems implement a binary of specialist knowledge versus ignorance, so that authority of particular topics is inaccessible to all but a privileged few. This divide excludes women, indigenous people, and nature from positions of power and respect, and thus they become resources to be exploited for capital gain. Through this binary language of masculine European dominance, several myths are created. Firstly, the myth of science is that it is value-free, objective, and infallible. Second, the capitalist myth that the earth and human labor can sustainably be endlessly extracted as raw materials to be transformed into capital. This mechanized world view leaves no room for sympathy with one’s environment, or with exploited people, as they are only seen as resources. These myths are simply not true, and the world has already begun to see the affects of global warming and biodiversity decline as a direct result of this mindset disregarding nature’s value outside of the capitalist paradigm (Mies & Shiva, 2014). Despite the evidence that these ideologies are imperfect, they are reinforced by sign systems that permeate everyday life. In Myth Today, Barthes (1984) describes the construction of myth through the signified, signifier, and signs which in turn form the basis for symbol and myth. In the context of capitalist patriarchal science, we see that women and nature have come to signify each other; creating a ‘sign’ that is opposite of, inferior to, and ‘other’ from the logical man. This ‘other,’ feminized nature, then becomes a signifier for raw materials and resources to be extracted to support the symbol of capital. This in turn signifies the myth of the sustainability of capitalism through the systematic exploitation of the regenerative power of nature, women, and the labor of non-European peoples (Mies & Shiva, 2014).

During the enlightenment, European culture became fascinated with logic and rationalism as a way of understanding the natural world (Mies & Shiva, 2014). Through this system, man separates himself from nature, creating a binary in which man’s logic is a method for classification and domination. This obsession with classification was driven by the imperial need for capital and power. The natural sciences, which were meant to be value-fee and objective, were driven by capitalist imperialism and were susceptible to the political and gender biases of the time. Linnaean taxonomy became a perfect colonial tool for the homogenization of botanical knowledge for the purposes of bio-prospecting, as well as giving botanical science a professional status excluding women and native peoples. Sciences that were once considered “women’s knowledge” (such as herbalism) became discredited. As the work of women in science became appropriated, the role of the feminine gender within society became weakened. Binomial nomenclature became the standardized naming system for plants around the globe, and as each new species was ‘discovered,’ it was “named” by a masculine European voyager (O’Donnell, 2010). The Latinate names of these plants are deceptive; the native cultural contexts in which the plant had previously existed are erased by this notion of ‘discovery,’ as if its existence is only legitimized by the masculine proclamation of a European scientist. Secondly, Linnaean taxonomy itself is sexualized, gendered, and ocular-centric. Since plant names are often based on morphologic description, the use-value of the plant becomes one dimensionally aestheticized by being reduced solely to its visual characteristics (Ryan, 2009). The final insult to nature in colonial botany is that the plant is assessed for its commodified value in European markets (whether for food, medicine, or decoration in gardens) and brought back to Europe to be arranged and cultivated in artificial environments.

Plants and nature are further compartmentalized and decontextualized through the process of symbolic display in botanical gardens. By featuring a variety of plant life from around the world, these gardens become a microcosmic expression of imperial wealth and power (Mukerji, 2005). The plant as a living being is subverted by being perceived as a horticultural object; part of a spectator-spectacle relationship in which it is viewed for its beauty. As the bloom is valued as the most beautiful and desirable phase within the life cycle of a plant, its seasonal appearance creates the illusion of performativity to be admired by human. This hierarchical relationship casts the plant (representing nature, beauty, and femininity) as an object meant to be used for the delight of the rational masculine subject (Ryan, 2009).

Many 17th to 19th century philosophers, who are still highly influential today, have compared women and flowers for their beauty, frailty, and intellectual inferiority to men. When upper class women began to take interest in botanical subjects due to Erasumus Darwin’s poem The Botanic Garden, there was much controversy over their ability to reason and partake in the sciences. It was thought by Rousseau that women only took interest in logic and reason as a way of embellishment; as if a woman wanting to educate herself was synonymous with being fashionable. Though women were thought to be closer to nature, it seemed that they still were not allowed to engage with it scientifically. Women’s ability to reason was further undermined by comparisons to plants in ways that emphasized their weakness, immobility, and performative beauty. Hegel contrasted men and women by stating that man is more like an animal, where women are more like plants. As man is seen to have agency, be active and able to take action; a woman is seen as more plant-like and passive. Since man is active he may move about and acquire knowledge that is universal, and though while women may have “insights,” they are only local, and limited by emotions and lack of mobility. Burke believed that women’s beauty, like flowers, is directly correlated with their weakness and reluctance; an idea reinforced by Kant’s description of femininity as delicate and naive (George, 2007). Other botanical metaphors specifically targeted women as frivolous and trendy, such as Alexander Pope’s comparison of feminine beauty to that of variegated tulips; specifically alluding to the fact that such tulips were planted in dung and thus the apparent beauty is a symptom of hidden ugliness (George, 2007). In The Flowers Personified, written in 1849, by J. J. Grandville, women were literally portrayed as flowers, representing gendered notions of femininity such as the archetypal “damsel in distress” (Branson, 2012). These satirical comparisons do both women and plants a disservice: by showcasing weakness and beauty at the expense of intellect, they create a feminine paradigm that is essentially subordinate to masculinity, ignorant of the values women and plants have to offer beyond ornament. Mary Wollstonecraft engaged with this misrepresentation of women as frivolous plants in “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” in which she asserted that women have fulfilled this idealized but faltering vision of beauty only because of the way society had ‘cultivated’ them as objects of beauty, thus depriving women recognition of and encouragement for their mental capabilities. Wollstonecraft challenges the way in which women and exotic flowers are compared, revealing that these expressions are ultimately the projections of male desire (George, 2007). Wollstonecraft was addressing the symptom of deeply engrained sexism within her society. By making gendered associations to visual similarities between women and plants, women are made to be thought of in terms of their bodies rather than their minds and are denied autonomy. In this way women are dehumanized, being made ‘other’ from men. Men are seen as people, where as women are seen as their gender. Therefore, the notion of gender is problematic because it automatically signifies women as a deviation from what is ‘normal’ or human (Butler, 1990).

Since women were discouraged or restricted from professional science in the 17th to 19th centuries, many chose to engage with botanical knowledge through gendered proclivities, such as needlework and art. Women who attended local seminars to learn more about botany were also discouraged, as they were not taken seriously by their male peers who focused more on their appearance than their academic interests. Though women learned of botany through many of the same channels as men, their work was undermined by their gender. Much of the art and women’s writing has been categorized as crafts and hobbies and thus not considered as serious contributions to botanical knowledge. Even in the case of botanist and illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian, who was an explorer and scientist who studied plants and insects, was portrayed as a maternal figure rather than a professional scientist in the publication of her work (Branson, 2012). As women’s historical work with botany has been improperly categorized, this knowledge becomes harder to access today. It is unknown what histories have been hidden or what developments may have happened if women had not been hindered from entering the professional sciences by their gender.

Women’s growing interest in botany and Linnaean’s sexual classification system also raised issues of women’s sexuality and decency. The first component of The Botanic Garden is a portion titled The loves of plants in which pollination is described as taking place on the marital bed between gendered husband and wife plants. The most scandalous, however, was the metaphorical description describing ways in which some flowers pollinate with various partners or “concubines” and other flowers sexual systems are barely visible and reproduce in “clandestine” marriages. This information was thought to be scandalous and improper for women to know (George, 2007). Mary Delany, who lived 1700-1788, was one artist who was greatly influenced by these writings, as her artwork is often thought to be an expression of female anatomy and sexuality. The concept that plants reproduction seemed similar to that of humans, and in a ways that did not denote compulsory heteronormativity and monogamy, became a metaphor through which she could describe her intimate relationships with her female friends (Moore, 2005). In her paper cut-outs created from when she was between the ages of 74 to 82 years of age, she uses the associations of femininity and flora and creates bold images where the flower is celebrated. Unlike the dissections of botanical subjects created as scientific documents, her intimate collages give the flower a sense of identity and sensuality. Though Delany’s incredible works were both striking and accurate, they have been discredited and thought of as craft rather that high art due to the fact that she was a woman (Moore, 2005).

Botanical art, as differentiated from botanical illustration, was long considered an amateur craft that was acceptable for women (Moore, 2005). Whereas botanical illustration made to serve specific scientific needs, botanical art is less regimented and thus can be open to more expressive interpretations of botanical subjects. Though it has faced gendered discrimination over the years, and often been thought of as kitsch or purely decorative, botanical art can show unique analyses of the natural world. As a member of botanical art community, I have observed that women are still the predominant inheritors of this traditional gendered practice, continuing to reclaim botanical imagery and femininity. Plants are depicted as living individuals as opposed to generalized specimens to be dissected and compartmentalized. Botanical art celebrates plants for their individuality rather than their adherence to standard characteristics needed for speciation, and often challenges tradition beauty standards. Fiona Strickland, for example, paints dying flowers. The dead flower is an individual, rather than a specimen, with which the viewer can empathize. Rosie Saunders is another contemporary botanical artist who shifts the perception of flowers as delicate and timid by painting them at a very large scale. This creates a space where the plant is given power, and the once frail petals become an impressive and unfamiliar landscape. Today botanical art is thriving, more popular than ever before. Women continue to take back the dialogue and question the passivity of plants and femininity by applying their knowledge and experience into stunning visuals that have impact on the way inherent value of nature and biodiversity is perceived.

Understanding gendered power dynamics can help explain the ways in which women and nature have come to be associated in ways that have been systematically harmful. From commodification to aestheticization, capitalist patriarchal systems have marginalized that which is not perceived as ‘masculine.’ Systems within the natural sciences were developed for imperial purposes, thus creating bias and privileging European males; shaping a view of nature as the opposite of logic, and a thing to be dominated. Understanding of these systems can be applied to the way in which botanical metaphor implemented to change feminine paradigms and allow for the acceptance of more humanized, complex identities. Representing botanical subjects as unique, living individuals can help create a sympathetic (rather than mechanistic) vision of the natural world, equalizing gendered binaries and allowing for respect of natural resources and the acknowledgment of complex feminine identities.

References

Barthes, R. & Lavers, A. (Trans) (1984) Myth Today, Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang.

Branson, S. (2012) Flora and Femininity: Gender and Botany in Early America. Common-Place, American Antiquarian Society and the University of Connecticut, http://www.common-place.org/vol-12/no-02/branson/

Butler, J. (1990) Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1: Subject of Sex/Gender/Desire, New York: Routledge.

George, S. (2007) Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing 1760-1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant, Manchester: Manchester UP.

Moore, L. L. (2005) Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships. Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.1, pp. 49-70, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053588

Mies, M. & Shiva, V. (2014) Ecofeminism, Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood Publications.

O’Donnell, R. (2010) ‘Imperial Plants: Modern Science, Plant Classification and European Voyages of Discovery’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 7.1., http://gjss.org/sites/default/files/issues/chapters/papers/Journal-07-01–05-ODonnell.pdf

Ryan, J. C. & Rooney, Monique (ed.) (2009) ‘Plants That Perform For You’? From Floral Aesthetics to Floraesthesis in the Southwest of Western Australia,’ Australian Humanities Review, 47. pp. 117-40. Available from: http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/ryan.html

Mukerji, C. (2005) ‘Dominion, Demonstration, and Domination,’ In: Schiebinger, L. (ed.), Swan, C. (ed.). (2005) Colonial Botany, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Can ‘Disavowals’ be read as a performance art piece?

Frida Alvinzi

I had a vivid experience reading Disavowals and experienced it as a living sculpture piece. This essay will explore how Disavowals uses Claude Cahun’s body to create a landscape from images and text. Through this an experiential journey takes place, similar to that of a performance art piece, consisting of time, space, the artist’s body and the relationship between the performer and the audience. The essay will start by investigating how Disavowals references theatrical themes and explores the phenomenon of the ‘book’ as a stage. Here the artist’s body becomes central, being used to question and explore roles and the concept of identity, by means of Cahun’s performance, changing appearance and by her play with photomontages and metaphorical poetic transformations in the text. I argue that the reader is invited into the book to be part of an adventure and to experience the book in real time as a performance. I will discuss Lacan’s Mirror-Stage Theory in relation to the creation of a ‘play’ with mirrors and reflections, and how Disavowals uses the act of looking as a medium to be present with the reader—how the boundaries between the artwork and the other become blurred as the book challenges the reader to activity. The essay goes on to explore how Cahun celebrated the play and freedom of thought she found in children, and challenges especially Freud’s ideas around human psychology and development from childhood into adulthood. It examines Artaud’s ideas in terms of the audience becoming part of the performance, together with similarities between his ideas, on finding a new language for the theatre, and the visual poetry explored in Disavowals. Finally I look at how a book is physically interacted with as an object and experienced within a space.

Inspiration from Theatre

Cahun’s background in theatre is evident throughout the book.   Many of the photographic portraits are from earlier parts she had in plays, when she acted in Pierre Albert-Birot’s theatre company Le Plateau, in Paris in the 1920s. The metamorphic ability of dress was something that inspired Cahun and for her roles on stage at Le Plateau she made many of her own costumes with much creative input. Cahun’s sensitivity and understanding of the theatre and the roles she played was an artistic practice that she continued to explore in Disavowals, both within her written texts, and through imagery. The performative experience of Disavowals is highlighted both by the use of dark backgrounds in the images, which create the feeling of lifting Cahun’s body onto a stage where she is lit up like an actor, and by references to classic literature, myths and plays, such as Salome, a biblical myth turned into a play by Oscar Wilde (Welby-Everard, 2006: 1-24). 

The Artist Body, Roles and Identity

The use of the artist’s body is central to performance and also central to Disavowals, with the theatre and the masquerade as its heart (Welby-Everard, 2006: 3-6). The photomontages made up of portraits of Cahun are taken by her partner, Marcel Moore. Together they used the photographs to rearrange Cahun’s body so as to carry messages about the desirer, sexuality and love, and also to criticize a society that idealizes stereotypes. Using the metaphor of the snake’s ability to change her skin, Cahun explores how a changed appearance can also transform the self, and she is always switching between the role of a man and that of a woman. The mask is a theme flowing through Disavowals, and reinforces the feeling of theatricality, but instead of condemning the mask to live only on the stage, Cahun explores how people wear masks in society and everyday life, by being assigned roles of how to behave and to live by the “rules”. Cahun uses the concept of mask to her own advantage and encourages the reader to be playful and, through creativity, take control of her own life using Disavowals as a stage, inviting the performative reader to perform with her, and to experience also her own selves (Shaw 2013: 45, 200-210). The image of Cahun posing as a classic statue of Venus in the image below is an example I find particularly striking. Here Cahun has stripped herself of all sensual and female attributes; the idealised statue of beauty has turned into a powerful woman with Cahun’s personal features being visible (Shaw 2013: 105-109).

Image and Text

A photomontage opens up each chapter and the themes in the images are also explored in the text, with added performative aspects. Both costume and text provide additional layers and meanings to the book; for instance in the image below, the featured characters look to me as if they are floating in dark skies or in a black pond. As the eye moves between the many details of the image I feel it creates a sense of movement which is reinforced by sequential imagery, as in the top left corner where Cahun holds up a gun to her head and yet, in the image behind this one, is trying to protect herself from it. This photomontage, as further explored in text, describes a brutal dream that she has had. By using the sense, as I described earlier, of the “floating” movement of the image, opening up to the text about the dream, it feels to me as if the reader has taken a step into Cahun’s inner universe. Looking into the darkness of the background, there are two ribcages; it is as if the viewer really is inside of Cahun’s body (Shaw, 2013: 190-193).

Exploration of Time

As the pages of Disavowals unfold we move back and forth in time, between Cahun’s childhood, her present experiences, and her dreams. She also aims to enter into the time and space of the reader. The non-linear approach of Disavowals renders the book similar to an experience in a person’s life, where past events affect the present and vice versa, challenging the reader’s concept of time. It is furthermore, I feel, as if Cahun and Moore have preserved an experience, which they then pass down to the reader over time and space. In fact the beginning of Disavowals asks the reader to treat the book as an adventure (an experience), and at the end encourages the reader to continue this journey. It seems to me that time is an important concept to Disavowals and also to a performance (Shaw, 2013:1-5).

Games, Challenges, Reality and Imagination

Disavowals challenges the readers to activity by, for instance, involving her/him in the psychoanalysis of characters portrayed in the book. We are referred to psychological and scientific tests which Cahun challenges by shining light on the difficulty of diagnosing an individual, due to the fact that communication can fail. Using imagery to express the subtle mysteriousness of a person’s inner world, contrasted with the text, Disavowals makes the limitations of words visible (Shaw, 2013: 145-151).

The book further involves the reader by encouraging her/him to use their imagination and question the relationship between what is real and what is imagined, doing this by exploring the concept of games. In the photomontage above, Shaw (2013: 180) argues that it looks as if the shadow that would be falling from a large chess piece in the right hand corner would actually come from outside the book, as if beside the book’s viewer. The chess piece is playing itself without being controlled by anybody. By skilfully arranging images Cahun and Moore evoke the power of imagination and become present in our time. The chapter that follows this text lets the reader know that the photomontage is referring to games of love. Cahun shines light on the fact that it usually takes more than one to play. She uses the chessboard to question power struggles within relationships, where the one is often ruled by the other. She wants the reader to challenge concepts of high and low, male and female, good and bad. By introducing the deck of cards in the image she contrasts the chessboard with the card that symbolises chance and the “unknown”. The cards feature images representing a gender neutral Queen and a gender neutral Jack as mythical figures representing gods of creativity, knowledge and fighting. Cahun envisions a new type of game that allows for new roles to be played, invented and imagined together with her readers (Shaw, 2013: 175-210).

 In the image opening Chapter V there is one image referring to a game sometimes used by surrealist artists called the Exquisite Corpse. Here a creature is created (as an exquisite corpse) with its limbs made up by both adults and children’s body parts, expressing Disavowals’ longing for liberty and freedom in a society where people “grow up” fast. Cahun is looking for her and her reader’s inner children who are still open minded, free from judgements that come with adulthood, and who have not lost their playfulness. Disavowals contrasts its celebration of childhood with Freud’s theories around sexuality and desire. Freud claims that people who don’t follow the norm, including those who, like Cahun and Moore, are homosexual, are stuck on an infantile stage and not capable of “normal” socialisation. With Disavowals Cahun challenge Freud’s theories, implying that people who follow the norm and only play with the roles given to them as readymade chess pieces will not be capable of finding true love (Shaw 2013; 156-168). Cahun explores the possibility that love is found through dialogue, collaboration and creativity, in art and life, and games of love should be used to explore and evolve rather than oppress both the self as well as the other (Shaw 2013; 186-187).

Mirrors and Reflections

By creating a play with mirrors and reflections Disavowals uses the act of looking as a medium to become present with the reader and explore ways in which a subject matter can be experienced. In Lacan’s Mirror-Stage Theory people become narcissistic when growing up because the image reflected of them is an idealization which in reality they never can live up to. Lacan’s theory says that this is at the root of many imbalances between people and social groups in society, due to feelings of inferiority this creates in people (Walsh, 2013: 52-53). Disavowals wants the reader to break the mirror to see what is behind the reflection, and it becomes a broken mirror, with all the bits stuck back together again to form a new kind of experience. Cahun creates a portrait of reflections that mirror and disclose a person’s imperfections. Cahun and Moore explore themes of self-love as well as love for the other. The viewer and her subject change places with each other. Just as an eye both views and is viewed, so the subject becomes the other. In this way I feel that they erase the borders between a piece of art and its viewer, the artwork comes to life, and Disavowals interacts with its reader. Moore and Cahun need the collaboration of their audience to carry out their intentions (Shaw, 2013: 70-101).

Disavowals in relation to Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double.

The way in which Cahun uses her body to visualize psychological torments puts the viewer and reader on edge and is reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double. Artaud argues that in order to shock the viewer out of her/his complacency, theatre must afflict the audience with sharpness, as if it were a knife. Artaud writes about the relationship between the actor, the stage and the audience, and of how to make the viewers part of the performance. Disavowals uses the theme of the mirror likewise and it feels as if Cahun reflects herself all around you, as if you are now a being within her kaleidoscope (Artaud, 1958: 74-83).

Creating a vision where the actor, by use of costume becomes the visual landscape of the play, Artaud envisioned a new type of language created for the theatre where the actor’s body would “speak”, rather than her words, using gestures and costumes to create symbolic shapes similar to poetry. Even though Disavowals features text and written dialogue, the poetic sign language of the use of Cahun’s body, as visualized in the photomontages, I think corresponds to Artaud’s vision (Artaud, 1958; 68-73).

In The Theatre and its Double Artaud also talks abut how he has vivid experiences by looking at paintings such as Lucas van Leyden’s The Daughters of Lot. He feels that these paintings have such great dramatic qualities and writes about how he can even hear and smell them, and that this is how he imagines the theatre to be. This feeling of a painting, in all its two dimensional existence, being capable of evoking the sense of sound and smell parallels how I experienced Disavowals. To experience this book as a performance art piece is made possible by our ability to blur the boundaries between our senses, as well as those between the real and the imaginary, but it is also due to the fact that the reading of a book happens in real time: the reader, when turning the pages, has a physical interaction with the book as object, which is further experienced in a space containing sounds, smells and a certain temperature (Artaud, 1958: 33-47). 

Conclusion

Disavowals, by means of its play themes, references to classical literature and myth, mixed with the feeling of theatricality and references to the stage, opens up its performative aspects. The body being the central artistic medium in performance art is also at the heart of Disavowals. An image opens each chapter, functioning like a stage featuring Cahun as the actor, using photographs of her body which, when rearranged and mixed with collage, create a mysterious world of shapes and signs. Disavowals becomes a loaded art piece, inviting its reader to investigate the boundaries between reality and imagination, between past and present, death and life. Cahun and Moore also invite the reader to perform with them, creating a dialogue in which the roles and stereotypes of society are investigated and questioned. By introducing games and challenges the book encourages the reader to be active. Disavowals encourages play and creativity, used to find the power contained in the act of daring to stand out of the norm, to be an artist, a creator, and it blurs the boundaries between art and life.

The concept of the other is challenged by inviting the gaze into the subject matter, hence erasing the idealized version of a reflection, making me feel that she opens up new ways in which to experience a piece of art. The act of looking itself becomes a medium in which, using Cahun’s powerful eyes, the viewer is mirrored and the viewer in turn mirrors Cahun, opening up the possibility of Cahun becoming present and eternal.

I felt reading Disavowals that I, the audience, was at the centre of the performance and that Cahun was acting out Disavowals in multiple reflections all around me. Artaud’s aims in The Theatre and its Double, to create a new language for the theatre, like a visual poetry, is something I feel is also explored in the images of Disavowals.As an object a book is experienced in real time and space and is physically interacted with by its readers. So that Cahun’s and Moores’ ability to use image and text in inventive and fantastical ways opens up a realm, for the imaginative reader, I would argue, of the possibility for Disavowals to be read as a performance art piece.

References

Artaud, A. (1958) The Theater and its Double, New York: Grove Press.

Cahun, C. (2007) Disavowals, London: Tate, First Edition, (1930) Aveux non Anvenus, France: Editions du Carrefour.

Shaw, Jennifer L. (2013) Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals, USA: Ashgate Publishing company.

Walsh, M. (2013) Art & Psychoanalysis, London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.

Welby-Everard, M. (2006) ‘The Theatre of Claude Cahun’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 3-24.

Do films that use a documentary style tell us the truth about the society they present?

Julie Laing

Documentary film has connotations of veracity, but does this mean that films that use a documentary style tell us the truth about the society they present? In this essay I will argue that filmmakers use the documentary style to suggest that the view of society presented by them is truthful even when their work is a subjective and selective record of the events portrayed. To examine this issue I will focus on the turbulent period of the 1930s to the 1960s in Europe, which politicised populations and exposed them to mass uncertainty. Here some filmmakers chose to create worlds to which audiences could escape, while others sought to bring about change and reconfigure society through the presentation of images and ideas. I will argue that many filmmakers were motivated by their social conscience to deploy their directorial skills for the greater good; that is, to promote contemporary political ideas which they believed would improve the world for themselves and for others. I’ll suggest that the perception of documentary style as truthful made it particularly appropriate as it enabled audiences to understand their war-torn world and conceive a pathway to the future through the turmoil.

To approach and answer the question I will demonstrate how Leni Riefenstahl, Roberto Rossellini and Jean-Luc Godard manipulated documentary techniques to stimulate support for social change, for both good and for ill. I will show that while these directors integrated documentary techniques in very different ways, all three constructed their narratives to stimulate a political response in real people. Through reference to a renowned film of each director, I’ll demonstrate how documentary language has been used to inscribe a particular ideology. I’ll argue that: Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will uses a combination of real footage and staged opportunities to consolidate Nazi power at a turning point in German modern history (Riefenstahl, 1934); much of the impact of Roberto Rossellini’s dispassionate feature film Germany: Year Zero derives from his exploitation of the ruins of post-War Berlin as a location and the Neo-realist style to drive home the consequences of the regime supported by Riefenstahl (Rossellini, 1947); and in his black comedy Week-end Jean-Luc Godard’s crashes the monotonous recitation of real political texts into bizarre, realistically shot fictional episodes to ridicule post-war capitalist excesses and jolt viewers out of passive consumption and into active engagement (Godard, 1967). I’ll demonstrate that the style and content of these films was shaped by their times and that the selection of documentary elements was necessary to appeal to societies that had witnessed horror. I’ll conclude that the worlds constructed Riefenstahl, Rossellini and Godard are, despite their claim to a kind of documentary truth, mediated and subjective representations of their personal response to the political events that shaped them and their contemporaries.

Documentary style and the greater good

In periods of social upheaval, such as war and its aftermath, filmmakers come under pressure to apply their skills to politically motivated causes for the ‘greater good’ of society. They are mobilised to support or challenge the dominant morality, choosing to mediate the legacy and construct and reconstruct the past, present and future based on their subjective world view and propose new identities. Philosophers over the centuries have defined conscience and highlighted its importance to social order and morality (Bahm, 1965: 131; Thilly, 1900: 22; Rosenblum, 1981: 105).

Documentary style is particularly appealing to any individual or cause seeking to influence the social order as there is a common perception that inherent in it is the ‘truth’.  As a film form it was established in the early 20th century and the earliest examples were travelogues. John Grierson is credited with coining the term in relation to film and in several essays outlined what he sees as its fundamental principles. He is clear that the form is non-fiction, presents reality and should show that society is essentially cooperative and directed towards the betterment of society for its citizens (Grierson, 1976: 25). Over the decades following his definition, the use of handheld cameras, natural lighting and sound, talking heads, reconstructions and exclusion of non-diegetic music became shorthand for the truth and were perceived to encoded reality; the documentary medium became the message and the massage (McLuhan, 1968: track 1).

The truth as propaganda in Triumph of the Will

 So what form of conscience drove my chosen directors? Jean-Jacques Rousseau characterised demonstrated how humans can be taught how to progress from wilful self-love, to gratitude, to duty (Marks, 2006: 578-79). Manipulation of this process can be discerned in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1934). Self-love was in short supply in post-Versailles Germany, and Riefenstahl collaborated with Goebbels to construct using documentary tropes a pseudo-religious image of a benevolent leader who could restore their national pride and self-esteem. The opening voiceover of Triumph of the Will describes the broken state of the nation and leads into the solution—the political religion of Nazism as embodied by the Fuhrer. During an ethereal opening sequence he descends towards Nuremberg in his plane. Hitler himself is not yet visible in the frame, but his presence is suggested in every note and shot. He soars above the clouds accompanied by a heavenly non-diegetic score which implies his benign, omnipotent gaze (Riefenstahl, 1934). Reifenstahl herself acknowledged that she was initially impressed by Hitler, and along with those Germans who had not suffered yet from persecution, appeared to welcome the promise of German strength (Riefenstahl, 1992: 103).

The restored self-love described by Rousseau perhaps translated into genuine sense of duty. Reifenstahl described her style as film-verite and the use of real footage and events, apparently natural lighting and sound and minimal voiceover suggest this (Thomson, 2010: 822). She is, however, regarded by most commentators now as a propagandist and accused of contriving a spectacle through staging elements of the rallies (Sontag, 1976). Her omission of Hitler’s diatribes about the Jewish people and her selective footage of the military at play are cited. Shirtless and democratic, the rank and file relax before parading through Nuremberg (Ebert, 1994). This ‘insight’ to the lives of the troops constructs an unreal reality. Later footage of them, performing precisely in full uniform at magical night rallies, gazing with gratitude and loyalty towards their leader as if before a pulpit, drives home the message to follow. These scenes were real, but staged with film in mind to construct the myth of a nation that could last a thousand years. The pseudo-religious appeal spread to the German people who were directed to be loyal to their leader. Actual footage of spontaneous joyful reaction is interspersed with more phoney shots of smiling children, the future, and both are given equal value. Subjective shots from Hitler’s point of view reveal their gratitude. As his motorcade progresses through the real streets of Nuremberg, a young woman breaks free of the crowd and runs towards him, her face full of adoration. He engages benevolently and moves on.

Was this the truth? One million actual citizens voluntarily attended the 1934 Nuremberg rally, asking to be led out of recession and national despondency. Their truth, however, was very different from countless other Germans whose only solution was to hide or flee from the future. The lie they were sold by Hitler, Goebbels and Riefenstahl was Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer.   Reifenstahl’s own conscience, however, was not concerned with them, and despite her protestations that she was serving her country, was perhaps more motivated by personal gratification than duty (Riefenstahl, 1992: 257). Triumph of the Will brought her critical acclaim, prestigious awards and personal safety at a dangerous time. In the end, the reputation she craved was tainted by her inability to shake off her image as a key agent in the selling of the Nazi brand (Sontag, 1975). She died, though, apparently with a clear conscience, calling herself a documentary maker and having persistently refused to take any responsibility for the brutal reality of the Nazi legacy (Riefenstahl, 1992: 631).

Neorealist truth in Germany: Year Zero

Social conscience can also be motivated by emotions other than ‘duty’. It can also be a response to systemic injustice and an altruistic desire to ease suffering of others, a sense of ‘oughtness’ (Thilly, 1900: 20). Riefenstahl maintained that her ‘oughtness’ was driven by fear of the consequences of refusing Goebbels (Riefenstahl, 1992: 157). In contrast, Roberto Rossellini’s war effort suggests that his ‘oughtness’ stemmed from a concern about the legacy future generations would be left. His trilogy—Paisa (1946), Rome, Open City (1946) and Germany: Year Zero (1947)—employs the Neorealist style to condemn the social wreckage caused by the war. Through the eyes of a twelve-year old Berliner, Edmund, he demonstrates that society has broken down and citizens, young and old are being exploited and starved. Inherent is the message that this should not continue to be the state of affairs. Germany: Year Zero culminates in Edmund’s suicide after he concludes that he and his older siblings cannot support their dying father.

He endures daily the search for food, negotiating his way through a black market populated by paedophiles and SS officers in limbo. The political irony of Hitler’s failure to secure victory for his people is dramatized by the juxtaposition of reality and fiction. Edmund is sent to sell a rare recording of one of Hitler’s speeches to Allied soldiers. He plays it to them among the ruins of a public building. Hitler’s real-life promise to give ‘strength, confidence and comfort’ to the German people echoes round the rubble (Rossellini, 1947). But the irony is not constructed to inspire triumphalism; it is saying to audiences, this is a document of the lives our children are leading now as a consequence of fascism. Edmund symbolises the real-life children who are faced daily with impossible choices; in order to end his father’s suffering and inevitable starvation, he euthanases him. Days later we observe him as he kicks around the stones in a destroyed fountain close to his home. Rossellini said that he conceived the whole film—‘an objective and faithful portrait’—for this sequence (Rosenbaum, 2010). The distant, observational, documentary style, lack of dialogue or close-ups in this scene do not externalise the turmoil the boy is experiencing, but shortly after, we watch him ascend to the top floor of a building opposite his overcrowded flat. He watches his family and neighbours search for him and leave go to his father’s funeral. Presumably guilt-ridden, he takes his own life by jumping to his death.

A society where traumatised children escape life through suicide has failed, and this is the Europe Rossellini inhabited. A filmmaker cannot be poised, hand-held camera in hand, to capture such moments in real-life, so the fictional form is used to expose to war-weary audiences the bottom of the chasm they had fallen into. The unobtrusive use of neorealist style allows the film to avoid descent into melodrama or emotional manipulation. This was no set. Berlin lay in ruins, as did Cinecitta studios in Rome; shooting contemporaneously in the actual location was expedient, but succeeds in implying that the boy’s death is an event that represents the truth where reality itself cannot be caught on camera. The use of black and white film, at a time when Technicolor was exploding onto screens, calls to mind photojournalism and further encodes it. The camera remains distant; no Chaplinesque soft focus close-ups are required to reveal the boy’s misery. The space between the viewer and Edmund leaves sufficient emotional distance to stimulate an active audience response to prevent future children from enduring this fate.

‘Presentation, not representation’ in Week-end

Twenty years later Jean-Luc Godard was rolling his critical camera across French society and culture. As a result of the post-war boom, France’s economy had taken a turn for the better and consumerism had taken hold, conspicuously revealing the dedication of many citizens to the capitalist structure that ordered their lives. Godard is explicit about his intentions in making films. He was interested in ‘presentation, not representation’ and by implication, the truth (The Sun-Herald, 1968). He was vocal on the role of directors and stated that they should contribute to freedom, egalitarianism and comradeship and seek to expose the failings of society (Godard, 1950:17).

Godard combined documentary and fiction techniques to convey his political ideals. His public persona and activities coincide with the values he espouses and make it easier for audiences to believe him. In his black comedy Week-end (Godard, 1967) documentary is suggested through seemingly unfiltered recitation of actual political tracts and cinema verite camera techniques. But did Godard intend that we dutifully accept what he shows us at face value? In fact, he gives us little chance to be complacent. He disrupts our viewing to the extent that we are unable to become immersed in characterisation or narrative and have to engage with the anti-capitalist rhetoric expressed by Napoleon and hippy revolutionaries.  We are invited to analyse—not simply observe—the casual cruelty of bourgeois characters that plot each other’s deaths for financial gain and end up literally consuming each other.   We are unsettled by surreal encounters, ironic intertitles and made conscious of the camerawork. The famous nine-minute tracking shot of a weekend traffic jam suggests a documentary lens but the mundane detail of a traffic jam—picnics and squabbles—is casually juxtaposed with dead bodies, and ignored by characters desensitised to their world. The bourgeois protagonists in the end escape the jam by skipping the queue and speeding off, their careless attitude to the carnage around them serving as a metaphor for the real-life corruption in materialistic French society.  One character asks another, “Are you in a film or in reality?” and the audience is prompted to consider if real life society is as messed up as that one presented by Godard.

This process of active negotiation is crucial in politically-motivated film. The simple ‘looking’ at a spectacle will not stimulate the desired response. Godard would have been influenced by the work of phenomenologists and theorists such as Bertolt Brecht Walter Benjamin who examined how humans engage subjectively with the reality through cultural texts and suggest that meaning is negotiated between the film/object and the subject/audience in an active viewing process that leads to action (Frampton, 2006: 39). He, in turn, may have influenced, Jacques Ranciere and Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle takes polemic perhaps as far as it can go in film while still retaining an audience (Ranciere, 2007: 3, 11; Debord, 1973: 73).   Godard, however, does not let his experimental style overpower his message. Week-end is not real, but corruption is, and his manipulation of documentary techniques combines with black humour to stimulate a response that a more conventional narrative might not achieve. Godard warns his audience, shaped by World War Two and Vietnam, that the real world excesses of capitalism must be challenged to prevent the future, like the past, being scarred by destruction and inequality. Week-end was screened one year before the 1968 uprisings. Perhaps they listened to him. 

Conclusion

The style and content of these films was shaped by the periods in which they were made. Documentary techniques were manipulated to both suppress and expose the truth about war. The people of Europe had witnessed horrors that they could not easily shake off, and, eyes wide open, were receptive to images of reality which could help them interpret why and how they had come to this point, and where they should be going. The documentary style fitted the times and reflected the social conscience of the individual filmmakers referenced here. All three constructed for their fellow citizens a version of the society. Riefenstahl used the reality to mask reality; the plight of the Jews and others was untold, hidden behind aesthetically beautiful shots of idealised Aryans. Rossellini’s humanity is seen in his refusal to distort the truth and caricature the German people as monstrous Nazis. Instead he demonstrated the reality of their ruined lives and portrayed their plight as a humanitarian disaster that touches us all. Godard, referencing real events and politics—used satire to highlight the continuing systemic resort to conflict (Vietnam, class war) in the capitalist system. They all knew that the documentary lens projected towards a better future was an effective weapon in cinema’s fight against political apathy and a key cultural influence on the collective conscience. By grounding their narratives in real events, locations and ideologies, these filmmakers produced documents that have enabled past and contemporary audiences to question what we are told about our society. Today, on small screens, a jumble of consumerist trivia and cruelty on demand streams before our eyes. Directors like Godard and Rossellini are still needed to help us see the truth behind the reality.

References

Bahm, Archie (1965) ‘Theories of Conscience’, Ethics, Vol. 75, pp. 128-131.

Debord, Guy (1973) The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Rebel Press.

Ebert, Roger (1994), The wonderful horrible life of Leni Riefenstahl, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-wonderful-horrible-life-of-leni-riefenstahl-1994

Frampton, Daniel (2006) Filmosophy, London: Wallflower Press.

Godard, Jean-Luc (1972) Godard on Godard, Narboni, Jean & Milne, Tom (eds.), New York: Da Capo Press.

Grierson, John (1976) ‘First Principles of Documentary (1932-1934)’, in Barsam, Richard Meran (ed.) Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 19-30, New York: Dutton.

Marks, Jonathan (2006), ‘The Divine Instinct’ Rousseau and Conscience’ in The Review of Politics, Vol. 68, No. 4, pp. 564-585.

McLuhan, Marshall & Fiore, Quentin, (1968) The Medium is the Massage, track 1. Columbia Records, http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/mcluhan_marshall/Mcluhan-Marshall_The-Medium-Is-The-Massage_01-Stereo.mp3

Ranciere, Jacques (2007) The Emancipated Spectator, http://members.efn.org/~heroux /The-Emancipated-Spectator-.pdf

Riefenstahl, Leni (1992) The Sieve of Time, London: Quartet Books Ltd.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, Germany: Year Zero: The humanity of the defeated. http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1358-germany-year-zero-the-humanity-of-the-defeated

Rosenblum, Nancy (1981), ‘Thoreau’s Militant Conscience’ in Political Theory, Vol. 9. No 1 pp. 81-110.

Rossellini, Roberto (dir.) (1947) Germany: Year Zero, Italy: Criterion.

Sontag, Susan (1975), ‘Fascinating Fascism’ in New York Review of Books. New York http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/

The Sun-Herald (1968) Husband Eaten in Banned Paris Film

Thilly, Frank (1900), ‘Conscience’ in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 9, pp.18-29

Thomson, David (2010). The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 5th Ed. New York: Knopf

Triumph of the Will (1934), Directed by Leni Riefenstahl, Germany: Riefenstahl-Produktion

Week-end (1967), Directed by Godard, Jean-Luc. France: Ascot Cineraid