Values in work culture

As a counselor, I envy Kasuo Ishiguro. I mean we struggle professionally to establish empathy and rapport with individuals and groups. Walk in their shoes, as it were, to understand their issues. But for Ishiguro, to weave plausibility across country and culture seems to come naturally. He has the amazing ability to imagine people and situations, and write fiction into reality. 

He says in The Remains of the Day:

Now, naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways. But there is no virtue at all in clinging as some do to tradition merely for its own sake.

I would imagine that he refers to the orthodox traditions of Japan that he was born into, and spent early childhood in. With his experience of then and now, he perhaps perceives his origins as entrenched in the past when compared to the liberal West. But no, he puts the words in the mouth of Stevens the butler, English in every inch. This character, the protagonist of the book, is in charge of staff at an English manor in England around the time of World War II, a setting perhaps previous by a couple of decades to the birth of the book’s author.

It is true that Ishiguro has been immersed in Western culture from the age of five, but as an immigrant. Hence, to not only visualize a cultural context different from roots, but also to fit it into a bygone era has to be a feat. The author says he gleans much knowledge about the cultural distinctiveness from books. He probably also has a prodigious memory for detail to be able to capture their characteristic quirks – and for this book, the Booker prize.

 

Despite the enlightenment he projects against clinging to traditions, Englishman Stevens himself appears to find it difficult to break out of the standard received mould of a manservant in the England of the ‘forties. A story he mentions, and one that his father would frequently recount admiringly, is of the exploits of a British butler overseas. At the employer’s residence in colonial India, this man had suddenly discovered a tiger hiding under the dining table: 

The butler had left the dining room quietly, taking care to close the doors behind him, and proceeded calmly to the drawing room where his employer was taking tea with a number of visitors. There he attracted his employer’s attention with a polite cough, then whispered in the latter’s year: ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but there appears to be a tiger in the dining room. Perhaps you will permit the twelve-bores to be used?’ And according to legend, a few minutes later, the employer and his guests heard three gun shots. When the butler reappeared in the drawing room some time afterwards to refresh the teapots, the employer had enquired if all was well. ‘Perfectly fine, thank you, sir’, had come the reply. ‘Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.’

In the Stevens perspective, the onus is on the butler worth his salt to choose his employer intelligently. First, he must make a careful study of the employer and the work conditions. He must then make an informed choice for the best fit of employer-employee relations. Thereafter, the choice is binding. The highest work aspiration is to provide unquestioning service in all circumstances throughout employment. Stevens strongly disapproves of critical servants; they neither commit to tasks or stick with the job.

He muses:

For it is, in practice, simply not possible to adopt such a critical attitude towards an employer and at the same time provide good service. It is not simply that one is unlikely to be able to meet the many demands of service at the higher levels while one’s attention is being diverted by such matters; more fundamentally, a butler who is forever attempting to formulate his own ‘strong opinions’ on his employer’s affairs is bound to lack one quality essential in all good professionals: namely, loyalty.

The pronouncement probably resonates with Japanese traditions. But there is a distinct cultural difference. Honour and obedience to elders, especially family members, is paramount in the Asian cultures. In the England of the time, thoughts about the wellbeing the employer appears to trump familial bonds, as happens with Stevens.

The values of service mentioned in the book are hardly in evidence any more in the different regions of the globe. Is globalization to blame for this? Seems to me that we might point to the rise of professional management in organizations. As a result, the operational control of the concern has generally been separated from its ownership.

In the multinational corporation, for instance, commercial holdings of the company in various countries ensure that business transcends borders. Their management style and culture, knowledge and skill-based, is the same across continents. It drives the migration of the global workforce to different parts of the world, irrespective of individual nationality and culture. Their emergence has been welcomed as the process of unifying the world into one global village.  The exploitation of employees, a legacy of the industrial age where owners looked for ‘hands’ not ‘brains’, has thus been curtailed. 

Normally, the fear in the immigrant community would be of losing their cultural identity on foreign soil. Minor issues of discomfort in the new country may then appear magnified – the unfamiliar religious affiliations, food habits, currency calculations, traffic rules and even the inability to vent in the vernacular! These become emotional stressors. To keep from being assimilated, the people would find safety in like numbers, building around them an ethnic shield. A Chandni Chowk, a China Town, a Latin Quarter, and so on, develop in pockets to preserve continuity with ethnic origins.

The trouble is, the immigrant community very often clings to the past they have carried with them overseas. Unbeknownst to them, the social order may itself have evolved beyond back home. The traditions they swear by may in fact, be on the way to extinction in the parent nation, and they thus find themselves caught between cultures, with their adaptability in any case, suspect. 

The workplace, on the other hand, builds a structure and culture unlike society. They base almost solely on the rational numbers of business. This organizational sameness, whether in Asia or America, may appear familiar, reassuring to the individual immigrant.They immerse in work to stave off their angst. They tend to work harder than others to blend into the work culture, which serves the needs of the organization best. Should the culture call for an unwavering focus on the bottom-line, so be it, they live to serve its needs. 

However, there is a downside. The change of process causes the traditional attitudes to service to also change. Money has, instead, become the strongest motivator in the workplace.  In more recent times the pendulum seems to swing in the opposite direction.  Top management in many professionally managed companies resort to paying themselves obscene bonuses at the expense of the system and thousands of laid-off workers. The traditional values of service – commitment, honour, loyalty, and sacrifice, are casualty with the advancement of greed. We might shrug and call it collateral damage.  

Reference: 

Ishiguro Kazuo, “The Remains of the Day”. ISBN 978-0-571-25824-6. Faber and Faber Limited. Great Britain. 1989.

Preservation of culture?

In categorizing people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ groups, we refer to culture a lot.  According to our standards of judgement, these others belong to cultures that may be somewhat like us, or more usually, backward to us. Individual behaviours that may differ from our own, we tend to attribute to their cultural origins, their social DNA. Obviously, the term is of great importance to determine status in the civilized world.  

Culture means different things to different people. The spectrum of definitions the ‘Net throws up is wide, including: 

• Human intellectual achievement
•  Language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts
•  Quality of excellence in person or society in manners and scholarly pursuits
•  A form or stage of civilization
•  Development or improvement of the mind by education or training
•  Shared beliefs and behaviours of particular ethnic, social or age group.

However, in India, and elsewhere in the world, the administrative view of culture focuses on one aspect only – a form or stage of civilization. Accordingly, the preservation of culture is a practice. This does not apply to the mainstream, which may socialize in the global community. It is meant instead to protect uncontacted tribes located in the remotest parts of India’s vast diversity. But, does the process work?

 

No doubt the bureaucracy started out with sound rationales behind the practice.  Because they have lived so long in their own microcosms, these tribes have become endangered species. The rest of the world is toxic for them; hence the intention to save their numbers makes sense. Their physical survival is important against germs of modernity becoming life-threatening diseases.  

They are kept away on reservations of land tract, forest or islands. Their way of life of centuries continues, and that, on face value, seems logical. The social organization, their family structure, relationships and laws are to remain the same, same and same, as they ever were in the bygone days. Taxpayer monies are pumped in to maintain the appropriate ambience, and very heavy restrictions imposed on the surrounding environment. The laws strictly prohibit any interactions between mainstream society these isolated threads of humanity. Mainstream society is warned against entering their preserves, meeting the inhabitants or photographing them up close.  

I, however, find the present process discomforting. Fact is process implementation is faulty with inadequate safeguards and lax supervision. Its very purpose defeats with asphalt roads constructed around the reservations for the flow of convoys of tourist vehicles. When modernity invades their backyard, the tribes are hardly uncontacted anymore. The alien presence they are supposedly protected from is emphatically brought home to the people of the land. 

It seems to have become discriminatory, to keep the uncontacted backward, and make them anthropological attractions. Their ‘form or stage of civilization’ feeds the majority self-esteem. Tour operators rely on the greed of lower level administrative personnel to sell their tours. Their tourist convoys are little different from any jungle safari in search of exotic animals. There is folklore of their wild nature, their mistrust of outsiders, and their attacks with bows and poison-tipped arrows. They are taken as creatures of the wild and their habitats human zoos that excited tourists want to visit.  

The natural curiosity of a people is played upon. Inquisitive customers on tour crane their necks in eagerness for glimpses of their appearance with little or no clothing.  Convoy drivers are bribed to stop, and the tribals – especially women and children – to approach, enticed with food and other objects. They must then perform for the entertainments of a voyeuristic ‘superior’ civilization. The fact that they are living, breathing human beings worthy of dignity and respect, escapes attention. 

It carries the flavour of exploitation of groups unused to the culture of deception and guile. Unscrupulous middlemen take advantage of the gray areas. They grab every opportunity presented by loopholes in the system to further vested interests. Wherever there is an obstacle, bribes or favours are freely exchanged. What then is the point of laws when the measures to enforce them are weak or nonexistent?

 

In South America, watchdog organizations are able to expose the racketeering of corporate bodies that flout laws with impunity for their profits – owning land without title, deforesting without environmental licences. Because the people are isolated from modernity, and have neither the knowledge of laws, nor vigilant administrative support, they are easy prey for predatory groups unconcerned by their extinction. The spokespersons for some ancient tribes in Brazil and Peru have even claimed genocide of tribal population. 

One report from Paraguay last year says:

The secret agenda of a huge ranching firm in Paraguay has been exposed by satellite photos showing a newly-constructed reservoir. The reservoir reveals the firm’s intention to clear nearby forest belonging to an uncontacted tribe. In a pattern characteristic of the Chaco region, landowners first build large water containers before clearing tracts of forest for livestock. Carlos Casado SA’s construction of the reservoir puts neighboring Indians, especially uncontacted Ayoreo, in immediate danger.

Another report in March this year points out the growing dangers posed by unbridled industry:

Many Ayoreo have already been contacted and have been claiming title to the land owned by Carlos Casado S.A. for more than twenty years. Their uncontacted relatives who remain in the forest are extremely vulnerable to diseases brought in by outsiders, and unwanted contact could be deadly. The uncontacted Ayoreo are being forced to flee as their forest is being rapidly bulldozed to make way for cattle. … In 2009, Survival International successfully lobbied shareholders such as the Church of England and the Rowntree Trust to disinvest from mining giant Vedanta Resources, because of the company’s intention to mine the sacred mountain of the Dongria Kondh tribe.

 

It may be argued that in the Indian context, the situation is not so dire. I would add ‘yet’ since it is only a matter to time before it might be. The environment and fragile ecosystems are already endangered, as changing weather patterns testify. The lack of ethics in modern society makes illegal mining, deforestation, poaching, and industrial pollutions almost the rule. Corporate bottomlines drive the agenda, backed by powerful resources. Faced with the politico-corporate nexus, the bureaucracy falls silent, while India’s non-governmental social organizations lack bite. 

Superiority in this new age is certainly in terms of corruption. It threatens not only people groups, but also planet survival. The majority should forget their preoccupation with empty status and relearn from people backward to us a bit of forgotten ancient traditions. The uncontacted tribes have preserved a culture for centuries, that the mainstream has lost sight of – adaptability to Nature, and harmonious existence with its creations. They could ensure longevity of the planet, and yes, of our modernity.

Need to know temple culture

The sight of naked figures on temple architecture is disconcerting for a foreign traveler to India. She asks, in her blog, why these compromising positions should display at a temple. Obviously, at Western places of worship, nothing unprepossessing like them exists. The apparent social indiscipline upsets her organized mind, and the expectation of what should be. Clearly, there is a clash of cultures.

Organization gives meaning to everyday life in the West, a social control apparently missing in more organic cultures on the other side of the world. In the temple arts of India, erotic compositions in full view are usual. Male and female figures may be bejeweled, bedecked with flowers, but otherwise naked. 

Why? One thing for sure, the social context differs – certain artworks are dated around 6-2 millennium BCE. However, since paper trails documenting this remote past are inadequate, the conceptual reasons for the artworks must be left to conjecture. Numerous include have arisen in attempts to explain the practice. 

These include: 

• Sign of happiness, auspiciousness and prosperity: that the figures are motifs to bring good fortune.
• Mock the ascetics: that the intent is to ridicule the esoteric practices of the extreme sects. 
• Code language: that the compositions carry a deeper spiritual meaning. The figures are not about the humans but symbolic representations of attributes of Nature. 
• Conceal the magico-propitiory yantra: that the figures are a distraction, used to conceal the important points of specific ritualistic designs. 
• Non-duality: that the male and female elements are opposing forces that complement each other, and ultimately become One. 

It is known, however, that there were restrictions on the dissemination of knowledge. It was strictly on need to know basis, in the sense that only worthy receptacles could receive knowledge. Not segregation by birth, but by ability. Truth to be revealed to a person depended upon their level of spiritual preparedness for it. Seats of education were the gurukul, the ashram or temple home of the teachers, who were priests and also householders. Knowledge was not open to the uninitiated, neither was entry to the temples. 

For instance, the Rig Veda, the oldest of the written scriptures, which dates around six millennia BCE, is an epic poem with over ten thousand verses. The verses can be chanted in three different meters that change their interpretation of divine truths.  Students would be allowed a particular meter only after they were deemed fit and ready for it. Else, the hidden meanings would be kept secret. 

The Hindu temple arts of India were created over several millennia, from ancient to medieval times. They are often carved or painted in intricate designs on solid rock. In some places, they are within caves in the mountainside. Unknown artists laboured over them, with rudimentary chisels and hammers, and organic colours of the time, to create sculptures and murals that have survived the ages. Their models were not live humans, but products of their imagination.

Objectification of gender is not the purpose in temple art. The lack of clothing on the figures signifies divinity, when the light of complete self-awareness renders external coverings redundant. The gods and goddesses depicted are meant to be numerous forms of One Supreme Being - the one that becomes many. The figures and their relationships are heavy with symbolism; male and female elements complement each other in their representative powers.
 
Stephen Knapp writes:

In the Vedic tradition it is common to see the pairing of the Vedic male Gods with a female counterpart, thus combining both sets of powers and qualities that each would have. We can easily see this in Radha-Krishna, Sita-Rama, Lakshmi-Vishnu, Durga-Shiva, Sarasvati-Brahma, Indrani-Indra, etc. Thus, we have the combination of male and female Divinities that make the complete balance in the divine spiritual powers.

Fact is Hinduism started out as a philosophy, not as a religion. Neither in ancient society was a woman barred from intellectual pursuits. Women as a group held high positions in society. The verses of the Rig Veda (the oldest of the scriptures written down about six millennia BCE, but likely composed far earlier) extol the prowess of over thirty women sages that were held in the highest esteem. 

The temple compositions retell stories from the mythology, the scriptures and other ancient texts. The multiply arms, heads, or animal parts in the portrayals also have symbolic meaning. The female elements in the compositions are not subordinate to the gods. The goddesses ache instead for victory in battles against male elements! In their pose, prototype and expression, they exude power. 

For instance, the image of Durga, the warrior goddess is shown to have eight arms. This means that she is able to combat in eight directions simultaneously that the male gods cannot! The ‘battle’ signifies the conflict of good and evil. Actually, ‘gods’ and ‘demons’ represent the strengths and weaknesses of a person, and the conflicts between them, rife moral dilemmas. 

In subsequent ages, Hinduism transformed to an orthodox religion with deity worship and ritualistic practices. Changes wrought by invasions, conquests, annexations and colonization of the country buried the gender equality of ancient India deep into the sands of time. The roles of sages, apostles, prophets and avatars became the prerogative of men in subsequent ages of patriarchy. The feminine gender was made to believe that they are the secondary sex, and thus their objectification justified. 

The point is the ancient temple arts communicate imagery of a bygone social context different from that today. Artefacts still standing, are possible testimony to the different reality. There and then, the female was at least equal to the male. Walls and architecture bear proof of the pride and power of female sexuality. Over time thereafter, women's groups appear to have lost sight of their identity, their social power, and, in the words of present day thinkers, their erotic territory. The pilgrimage for the modern woman should be to rediscover their social worth and value through relevant lessons from the past. They need to find power within their self, to chart for the future, the culture of enlightened gender roles. 

Why naked and ashamed

Mention ‘modern art’, and many of us might think vaguely of abstract sculptures and paintings that make little sense. Mention ‘erotic art’, and we immediately tune in to expect nude or semi-nude studies. The association of this branch of art with sexuality is strong. In the context of male and female identity development, the imagery could play an important socializing role. However, the focus of the artworks seems to be majorly on the sexual domination of gender instead.

A person’s sexuality would depend on their acceptance of the self, and their coming to terms with feelings and emotions generated in growing up. Knowledge about gender orientations, and acceptance of related social roles and responsibilities are a crucial part of the developmental process. The understanding helps young people become balanced, well-adjusted members of society. Thence, all of creation may be perceived living, breathing works of art. Male and female elements of Nature interact with the environment, secure in their own type of sexuality.

Erotic art imagery exalts nakedness. Nothing wrong with that really, since eroticism relates to arousing or being affected by sexual love or desire. The word originates in Eros, the name of the Greek god of love. Hence, the expression of desire should of course include love. In the present age, however, cynicism has crept in, and love is forgotten. Modernity seems to jump straight into sex instead. 

Erotic art has been made the product of male sexual fantasy. The function of the female form is the sexual service of men. Sculptures and paintings, developed in the West from the nineteenth century onwards, draw attention to the female anatomy thus sexualized.  Women are defined by the 3 b’s – breasts, buttocks, and belly. The artworks build upon the presumption that the modern fertility goddess aches to be touched.

To all intentions, they may as well be mindless and faceless objects. In the essay, Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art, Linda Nochlin writes: 

Whether the erotic object be breast or buttocks, shoes or corsets, a matter of pose or of prototype, the imagery of sexual delight or provocation has always been created about women for men’s enjoyment, by men.

The art seems replete with the subtle derogation of gender. In their imagery, women are props, devoid of individual identity. Consequently, active word associations with them are weak, passive, and sexually available. The exploitation of women within the composition and beyond are just part of the process culture created.

The point of erotic art is ownership – by men, of women. John Berger (quoted in Nochlin's essay) explains the trend that originated in Europe:

She is painted with extreme sensuous emphasis. Yet her sexuality is only superficially manifest in her actions or her own expression … The painting’s sexuality is manifest not in what it shows but in the owner-spectator’s (mine in this case) right to see her naked. Her nakedness is not a function of her sexuality but of the sexuality of those who have access to the picture. In the majority of European nudes there is a close parallel with the passivity which is endemic to prostitution.

Women’s personas are preyed upon, as willing or unwilling actors in the ongoing fantastical narrative of male sexual liberties. Men as a group have the power to enjoy the woman’s innocence, her vulnerability and her inability to protest her plight. Almost in the same vein, women artists themselves are deprecated. They are better known for their external relationships than their intrinsic talent. Naked and ashamed might sum up women’s social subordination in erotic art, and underscore their now characteristic low esteem. 

Nochlin however, appears to blame women rather than men for the situation. She writes:

This is, of course, not the result of some calculated plot on the part of men, but merely a reflection in the realm of art of woman’s lack of her own erotic territory on the map of nineteenth-century reality. Man is not only the subject of all erotic predicates, but the customer for all erotic products as well, and the customer is always right. Controlling both sex ad art, he and his fantasies conditioned the world of erotic imagination as well. Thus there seems to be no conceivable outlet for the expression of women’s viewpoint in nineteenth-century art, even in the realm of pure fantasy.  

No calculated plot? I would beg to differ. Patriarchy has been a social imposition all around the world from an earlier time no longer in memory. Not a bloody revolution, this was a slow, cultural assimilation that wiped off all trace of gender equality. The women's erotic territory that existed, suffered hostile takeover. 

The invasion of the social psyche has been insidious. The organization of community life institutionalized the dominance, and further, conditioned women into becoming the carriers of the culture. The projection of shame has been the most effective weapon to keep them in line and off-balanced, since the days of Eve. Individual men may distance from the perspective, but as a group, they do precious little to fix what, from the male viewpoint, does not seem broken. It is far more expedient to patronize the victim. 

The imagery used carries forward the culture. Which would women viewers identify with - the male perspective, or the low self-esteem? Either way, the patriarchal dominance continues. Women need to find new inspiration, to build a new perspective for the future free of objectification. Perhaps women artists could set a new trend to break the patriarchal stranglehold on their group. Naked is fine in erotic art – as long as the representative women own their sexuality with pride, not in shame, nor in service. 

Reference for this post:

Nochlin, Linda. “Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays”. ISBN 0-06-430183-4 (pbk.) Icon Editions. Westview Press, USA & UK. 1989.

Blessed to be born female?

Georgia O’Keefe’s early twentieth century paintings of the Black Iris flower are more readily perceived as her metaphoric preoccupation with female genitalia. It seems to me that the Nature worshipping era of the remote past would have instead perceived spirituality in her artworks. They would have definitely been taken to denote the awesome fertility powers of the Mother Goddess. However, since Freudian interpretations of sexuality impacted social knowledge, connotative associations appear to be grasped first in the global forum.   

Remnant artifacts of Nature worship have been found from the Indus Valley civilization of ancient India dated thousands of years before Christ. Several nations of the Asian sub-continent, independent in present day, share this common heritage. Excavations ongoing mainly in two countries, India and Pakistan, at Mohenjodaro, Harappa and other places, have so far uncovered only a small percentage of the buried cultural wealth. But, although the hieroglyphics of the time have not yet been deciphered, surely the art forms discovered there can tell a story of the time! They could give us an inkling of the stark social differences of mindset and value regarding gender, past to present.  

Various objects made and used by the people have been discovered. Many figurines of the artwork found have accentuated breasts and pelvis. Does this mean women were objectified then as now? No, say the fact-finders, the exaggerations are symbolic. They represent divinity, not humans - the cult of the Mother Goddess, the Earth Mother or Nature – and invoke attributes of bounty of the deity. Made of clay or terracotta, they show kinship with Earth. 

A website collecting historical information about deities explains the point:

As significant and suggestive is her iconography - the large breasts filled with milk, uncovered genital organs, beautifully dressed hair and a good number of bangles on her wrists. This is the iconic perception of the Being who bears, feeds, takes all calamities on her head and covers the born one under her protective umbrella and, at the same time, defines in the modeling of her form an absolute aesthetic beauty. As suggest her bangles, the traditional emblem of marital state, besides a mother she is also a consort. Thus, in her material manifestation, She represents, with absolute motherhood, also the absolute womanhood. She causes life and sustains it, and is also the cause of life, its inspiration and aspiration, and the reason to live.

Social demarcations would thus have dual levels to span the universe – the gods that live in the heavens, and humans on earth, descendent from them or fallen, stripped of powers. A saying in India, that what is fine for the gods is not fine for mortals, reminds the humans of their ultimate fallibility. And that the all-powerful divine beings need to be worshipped for appeasement and blessings, because the humans are too puny to manage on their own against harsh reality.

In this ancient Indian context, the female form has spiritual and religious significance. Because of the association with divine functions, women most likely enjoyed a high position in society. Perhaps to be born female was to be blessed! It is a distinct possibility that matriarchy, which now exists in pockets around the country, was far more pervasive. A ritual originating in fertility rites that to this day  initiates Hindu image worship, is the ghot puja. It is an earthenware pot filled with water and inscribed with a figure in vermilion, which symbolizes the pregnant womb. It invokes the Mother Goddess. The traditional Indian reverence for the mother figure may have its roots therein as well. 

By the third millennium BCE, the people of Indus Valley had learned to cast in metal. The bronze Dancing Girl is the most famous amongst the human and animal artifacts found. The difference from the Mother Goddess is immediately apparent - she lacks the physical exaggerations. Perhaps a little crude in face and limb technically, the statuette nevertheless indicates the status of women of the time. A quote from British archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler, describes its form and feature:

There is her little Baluchi-style face with pouting lips and insolent look in the eye. She's about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world.  

Indeed, attitude is immediately apparent in the body language. The pose – the hand on hip, the cocked stance, the lifted chin, the half-closed eyes, and the slanted look exude the impudence and comfort in skin hard to find amongst women today. Some writers suggest that the figurine is transgender. It is interesting to think, in extension, that gender may not have always been the divisive social issue it is at present. Identifying as female, in the image of the divine, may well have been totally acceptable in society.

Her nudity makes no difference to our appreciation of the artwork. Perhaps we notice it only because we belong to a different era, socialized into a different value system. Maybe in the early times, women were unused to suffering body issues! In remote regions of India, in tribes isolated from the mainstream to preserve their ancient culture, nakedness is their way of life. Jarawa women, for instance, may be more comfortable in the natural than many more civilized others might be fully clothed!

During the age of Nature worship, the people lived in awe of the environment. The power of the Goddess was perceived in every creation in the environment, and they bowed in reverence. Their imagery has been in celebration of the Divine. Against the spiritual backdrop, it is no surprise that temple art - rock carvings and cave paintings - are pretty explicit on the bountiful attributes of Nature.  

From there and then to here and now, how the perspective has changed! We expect that we control the environment today; hence we patronize the past. In the process, we tend to lose awareness of the sociocultural context of the age - and the artistic intent. Women, as a group, are habitually objectified. I remember overhearing some tourists a while ago. Eyes gleaming, the young men conversed raucously about the full figure displays of chicks in the temple artworks. It is not the fault of the artists but of particular sociocultural learning that perceptions of gender channel as they do. 

Must they be ugly?

I never really considered a social context to art before.  Artists idealize gods or royalty, create something incomprehensible or objectify sexuality. At least, it so seemed in my experience. A friend recently passed on to me Linda Nochlin’s collection of essays that I initially looked at only to be polite. But then some insights caught attention - the social power of gender portrayed in and through art.

Nochlin’s focus is the social status of women - or rather the lack of it - depicted in the structure and theme of the artworks. She investigates images painted by both male and female artists in the West, between 18-20^th centuries. It is interesting to note that in the art world as in any other organization, for female workers, the glass ceiling is imminent, among other things. Their being out of sight, so to speak, makes no difference!

In the essay Women, Art and Power, Nochlin writes:

… representations of women in art are founded upon and serve to reproduce indisputably accepted assumptions held by society in general, artists in particular and some artists more than others about men’s power over, superiority to, difference from, and necessary control of women, assumptions which are manifested in the visual structures as well as the thematic choices of the pictures in question.

Her sentences sometimes feel a sea of words, and I cannot claim to have understood all pronouncements of the book, but some perceptions make absolute sense. She points out how prevailing social contexts have strongly influenced the artists. Their works reflect the thought and guidelines of behaviour in the society of the times. These notions appear as subtext in the pictures about women and by women.

 

 

In the eighteenth century, assumptions about women being the secondary sex were clearly stronger than they are now. Women were conditioned to prefer death to defying conventions. Gender was objectified in art as in all aspects of everyday life, and so was class and race. The hierarchical divisions were rigid, immovable. For instance, a painting of honourable British women in colonial India during the sepoy mutiny, entitled In Memoriam, portrays them heroic in the face of danger. How so? The women do nothing at all to survive, but properly await their fate.

Nochlin explains:

Now there are at least two discourses articulated in this image. One is the overt story of heroic British ladies and their children during the Sepoy mutiny, fortifying themselves with prayer as they are about to be assaulted by savage, and presumably lustful, natives. The other discourse, less obvious, is the patriarchal and class-defined one which stipulates the appropriate behaviour for the lady, and it implies that no lady will ever unsex herself by going so far as to raise a hand in physical violence, even in defense of her children.

She says that the original image, considered too graphic for the delicate sensibilities of the upper crust Victorian society, had to be painted over with the Scottish rescuers appearing at left replacing the “presumably lustful” Indian rebels! 

For eons, respectability for women has meant the confines of home and family. Women are honourable in the community as long as they are weak, passive, nurturing and domesticated, available for the needs of their husbands, and with no real needs of their own except to be of service to preserve the social order. Women artists have been hard-pressed to find acceptability and self-expression outside the entrenched social rules. They have had to be subtle in their approach; else risk caricature. Case in point, Nameless and Friendless by Emily Mary Osborn in the nineteenth century that describes in more than a thousand words the plight of women in the harsh reality of the time.

The young woman artist/model, stepping outside the home, possibly facing hard times yet unwilling to lose her dignity, is nevertheless subject to keen male scrutiny and condescension, both for her person and her work. It is surprising that, despite this painting of 1857 being created by woman herself, it was described in a 1970 art publication as Gentlewoman reduced to dependence upon her brother’s art. Perhaps the standard received wisdom carried forward is that women are incapable of creativity. The female artist too must adhere to that social norm and deny talent to her female model...but does she?

The slightest aggression amongst women or other signs of being unsexed would banish them from the respectable class, and put them beyond the pale of ‘normal’ or ‘human’. Women social activists have thus been portrayed as poor, ugly, demonic rabble-rousers, destroyers of the social fabric. It would seem that these social have-nots strive, in frustration rage, to reverse proper power equations. Apparently, the mere attempt at being a change agent renders a woman certifiably insane! 

Some women artists of earlier times have adhered to the popular myth in their creations. Perhaps, riding the traditional bandwagon has been the only way for them to survive in the man’s world. Sadly in the process, they do themselves and their own representative group no service, because the association renders capable women untouchable - poor, mad and ugly – and open to derision. 

 

Many closet feminists suffer emotional pain in private at their own public obeisance to gender inequality. Unable to cross the invisible social barrier, they confess cloying the deception to the pages of their personal journals. In an essay on the works of Florine Stettheimer, Nochlin quotes a telling poem written by the artist and poet, but published only after her death:

Occasionally

A human being

Saw my light

Rushed in

Got singed

Got scared

Rushed out

Called fire

Or it happened

He tried to extinguish it

Never did a friend

Enjoy it

The way it was

So I learned to

Turn it low

Turn it out

When I meet a stranger---

Out of courtesy

I turn on a soft

Pink light

Which is found modest

Even charming

It is a protection

Against wear

And tears

And when

I am rid of

The-Always-To-Be-Stranger

I turn on my light

And become myself. 

Ah, yes, on the other side of the world in India as well, feminine initiative is traditionally discouraged. This image of assertive women being dark and disorderly has endured through mythological epics created over two and a half millennia ago. Durga, the sylvan deity, is the epitome of beauty and grace as wife and mother. But in her role as the warrior goddess Kali, she is depicted as so frighteningly bloodthirsty and uncontrollable that few women would want to identify with her fearsome (outcast) image or be inspired to action. Of course, only the intervention of husband Shiva, shames her into remembering her place, and brings the Kali fighting evil outside back home to her senses!

The at best patronizing attitudes to women and women’s work have resisted change in many parts of the world. Women must think, feel and act exactly as males at home or in society decide for them, or else. In social fundamentalism even today, women and girls seeking education or employment have been brutalized, defaced by acid, shot, raped and murdered; punished for transgressing some gender role or dress code dreamed up by men to reiterate authoritarianism. 

It is more than time to rectify this demeaning outlook. Many women artists have used deconstruction techniques to make their point, to expose and deny the standard received concepts of beauty. Hannah Hoch’s Pretty Girl is an intriguing photo-collage from, I believe, the 1920s. This woman artist was earlier considered marginal, but it seems to me that her bold perspective and courageous rejection of the pervasive patriarchal order puts her far ahead of her time.

Nochlin writes:

Pretty Girl is in part a savagely funny attack on mass-produced standards of beauty, the narcissism stimulated by the media to keep women unproblematically self-focused. At the same time, the collage allegorizes the arbitrarily constructed quality of all representations of beauty: the “pretty girl” of the title is clearly a product assembled from products …

I must confess that as a very ordinary spectator, my unconscious search has been for aesthetic harmony in art images. I remember once visiting a photo-art exhibition in USA in the late 1990s. I forget both theme and name of artist, but it seemed an ugly, unabashedly cynical display of larger-than-life male genitalia. Possibly I was both naïve and prudish that I found the pictures off-putting, although other viewers appeared unfazed. I thought it a deliberate intent to elicit reaction, which I found repugnant. Was it necessary to assault the senses to draw attention? I took it as narcissism hidden behind the right to freedom of expression, laziness in actually harnessing creativity, and a banking on gender to carry the work.

Nochlin’s essays push me, the reader, to rethink my own premises. Definitely there are thought-provoking aspects to art I overlooked before. I wonder today if I did that phallic photographer a disservice in my negativity. There might have been a social comment in the work that escaped me. Perhaps the artist attempted to shock viewers into a conscious awareness of the effects of overindulgence. The graphic images might actually have highlighted the increasing social preoccupation with the pursuit of pleasure in developed society. That technology scales new heights, but the minds of men remain entrenched in overt, self-absorbed and even deviant sexuality… I don’t know, maybe…  


Reference for this post:

Nochlin, Linda. "Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays". ISBN 0-06-430183-4 (pbk.) Icon Editions. Westview Press USA & UK. 1989.