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 18-20th 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.
