RECLAIMING VISUAL AND VISCERAL PLEASURE: SITUATING THE

FEMALE NUDE IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S PHOTOGRAPHY

Anastasia Fjodorova

ADM 5297 Research & Writing Methods

9 April 2013

   

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 2  

As a female artist who engages primarily with making photographic

representations of women, particularly of the nude, it is imperative that I take into

account the responsibility with which I do so. The photographic medium is, in and of

itself, a site of tension and for this reason images made of women can too easily

become categorized under the “male gaze”. The core of this argument has been

posited by John Berger and Laura Mulvey, and has been further supported by a

number of feminist theorists in their critiques of patriarchal ideologies present in

dominant representations of women. This paper, however, will argue that there are

other considerations that need to be taken into account when constructing a “reading”

of photographic images of women, particularly when produced by women. Issues of

spectator participation, masquerade, and the nature of the photograph itself, will be

discussed.

Berger’s argument can be simplified with the statement that “men act and

women appear.” The determining factor in the relations between men and women and

women and themselves is that men look at women, and women observe themselves

being looked at.1 “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female.

Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a

sight.”2 Mulvey takes this argument further by tying the image of woman to her place

as “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”3 Looking itself, according to Mulvey,

is a source of pleasure, as is being looked at, however there is an imbalance inherent

in this as pleasure in looking has been split between the active male and the passive

female:

                                                                                                               1 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Group, 1973), 47. 2 Ibid. 3 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Brady and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 835

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 3  

In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.4

Historically, as the oft-used example of Albrecht Dürer’s Draughtsman

Drawing a Recumbent Woman (1525) (Fig. 1) shows, the role of “artist” has been

attributed to the male, as one who is active, analytical, bearer of the gaze, and in

Linda Nochlin’s phrase the  “sexually dominant creator.”5 The artist’s model, in

contrast, is presented as passive, object of the gaze, and the malleable and raw

material for his creative intelligence.6 7 Rosemary Betterton suggests that women’s

relationship to the nude visual image is ambiguous due to the frequency with which

they are represented within images, yet their role as creators and viewers of such

images is rarely acknowledged.8 Linda Tickner writes:

The female image in all its variations is the mythical consequences of women’s exclusion from the making of art.9

She argues this artist/model dichotomy can be subverted when women use their own

bodies as subject and/or medium, thereby conflating the roles of artist, model, and the

work.10

                                                                                                               4 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 837. 5 Linda Nochlin, “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,” In Woman as Sex Object, Studies in Erotic Art 1730-1970, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 15. 6 Gill Saunders. The Nude: a new perspective (London: Herbert Press, 1989), 22. 7 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 843. 8 Beth A. Eck, “Men Are Much Harder: Gendered Viewing of Nude Images,” Gender and Society 17(5) (2003): 693, accessed January 6, 2013, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3594705. 9 Lisa Tickner, “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970,” Art History, 1(2) (1978): 247, accessed January 6, 2013, http://faculty.winthrop.edu/stockk/Contemporary%20Art/tickner%20female%20sexuality.pdf. 10 Tickner, “The Body Politic,” 244.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 4  

Figure 1. Albrecht Dürer 1525 Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman. Susan Bordo criticises such a simplistic rendering of the viewer/viewed

experience by noting that “passive” does not describe what is going on when one is

the object of the gaze. Her argument is that “inviting, receiving, and responding” are

all active behaviours.11 The theory of the “male gaze” as argued by Berger and

Mulvey is reductive in that it overlooks and rejects the possibility of the very real

pleasure that women can take in viewing representations of women. Their common

stance, as adopted by Annette Kuhn, is that if women enjoy an erotic picture, it is only

possible by adopting a masculine subject position, however, a spectator of either

gender has the option of identifying with, rather than objectifying, the woman in the

picture.12 Carol Ockman’s introduction to her book on the eroticized bodies present in

the work of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, sets out an argument, among others,

against the feminist criticism of his work that views his eroticizing of female bodies

as a reduction of women to their bodies with the intended spectator and consumer

being male.13 This analysis is done by discussing the variety of ways through which

women were involved with the representation of eroticized bodies as patrons,

                                                                                                               11 Eck, “Men Are Much Harder,” 693. 12 Annette Kuhn, “Lawless Seeing,” In Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1985), 31. 13 Carol Ockman, “Introduction,” In Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 5.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 5  

collectors, and critics.14 In this way Ockman posits a critique of both Berger’s and

Mulvey’s essential argument that women cannot look at representations of their

gender without immediately adopting a “masculine” point of view, when in actuality

the difficulty lies in women’s lack of language for theorizing the concept of

“women’s pleasure in looking.”15 When discussing her own experience of pleasure

while looking at the work of Ingres, Ockman writes, “ I was attempting to assert my

pleasure as a woman viewing Ingres’s work, when there was virtually no language for

doing so.”16

Mary Ellmann argues that it is precisely this lack of a women’ s language

which forces them to “accommodate” only the roles and images sanctioned by a

patriarchal ideology.17 “Those who have no country have no language,” and until

women have an accepted imagery and language that is their own, they will be unable

to express themselves.18 Constructing a new, feminist, visual language, however,

proves to be no simple task. Tickner argues that although political feminist art intends

to re-appropriate the connotations attributed to female imagery, such new imagery

risks not challenging, but rather indulging, clichés when using old visual references. 19

The danger with representations of women made through the medium of

“pure” photography is that if art seeks to intervene and challenge ideologically

sanctioned perceptions then the medium used to produce them should be “radical.”

“Radical” art is non-unity, a many-faceted collage/montage and is open to the play of

contradictions, and because of that should embrace new media encompassing

                                                                                                               14 Ockman, “Introduction,” 5. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Tickner, “The Body Politic,” 238. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 242.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 6  

performance, time-based, installation, video, and sound.20 As Bertolt Brecht contends,

“Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also

change.”21 Martha Rosler uses this argument, of the need for art that seeks to subvert

and challenge to embrace cutting-edge media, in her claim. In order for the personal

to be political when applied to art it cannot

mean doing work that looks like art had always looked, challenging little, but about which one claims that it is political just because it was done by a woman.22

Tickner argues that, as women have long been accused of narcissism, visual

representation of the female body is problematic for the assertion of new female

identities, and therefore, these identities cannot be achieved directly through

appearance.23 Furthermore, as Hilary Robinson stated, mass media and pornography

have very quickly appropriated and normalised images of female genitals, meaning

that their strategic use by feminist artists had to be reconsidered.24 Susan Robin

Suleiman compares the appropriation techniques used by modern patriarchy to those

of modern capitalism, as both have

a way of assimilating any number of potentially subversive gestures into the ‘mainstream,’ where whatever subversive energy they may have possessed becomes neutralized.25

                                                                                                               20 See Griselda Pollock, “Screening the seventies: sexuality and representation in feminist practice—a Brechtian perspective.” In Vision and Difference: femininity, feminism and the histories of art, (London: Routledge, 2003), 165. 21 Bertolt Brecht, “Popularity and Realism, “ In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (New York: Westview Press, 1982), 229. 22 Martha Rosler, “Well ‘is’ the Personal Political,” In Feminism Art Theory: an anthology, 1968-2000, ed. Hilary Robinson (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 96. 23 Tickner, “The Body Politic,” 245. 24 Hilary Robinson, “Reframing Women,” In Feminism Art Theory: an anthology, 1968-2000, ed. Hilary Robinson (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 538. 25 Susan Robin Suleiman, “(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism,” In The Female Body in Western Culture: contemporary perspectives, ed. Susan Robin Suleiman (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 11.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 7  

This is the problem inherent to all ‘images’, whatever the intentions of the maker.

When they enter into the public domain they are read in relation to other images that

form part of dominant discourses and ideologies, as Rozsika Parker and Griselda

Pollock demonstrate.26 They argue, that “what may seem like a critique of

pornographic images can in a public space simply be assimilated to those images it is

apparently seeking to undermine.”27 In pornography female genitals stand for the

whole female body, yet much of feminist art has mirrored this same focus on sexual

body parts, and reduced women’s bodies, as Donna Haraway states, “to the area

revealed by the tools of gynaecology.”28 Pollock and Parker argue specifically that

women are profoundly shaped by such images, becoming unwittingly compliant even

when the intellectual insult to women is recognized, as it is through them that women

come to imagine what they are or might be.29

As Pollock points out, photography’s illusory power of making the truth

“visible” in its all-knowing gaze, is yet another problematic that must be considered.30

As suggested by Foucault, photography, in all its capacity of appearing truthful, is not

an objective medium or innocent tool, but rather is implicated in the various power

relationships that structure society.31 Kuhn argues that, more so than other forms of

visual representation, photography does not reproduce a pre-existing world, but

constitutes a highly coded discourse, which, among other things, constructs whatever

                                                                                                               26 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Section I: Images and Signs, Introduction,” In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985, ed. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987), 126. 27 Parker and Pollock, “Section I: Images and Signs, Introduction,” 126. 28 Donna Haraway, “Contested Bodies,” Gender Expertise (1987): 72, quoted in Rosemary Betterton, “An Intimate Distance: Women, artists and the body,” In An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body, (London: Routledge, 1996), 10-11. 29 See Parker and Pollock, “Section I: Images and Signs, Introduction,” 125; Griselda Pollock, “Theory and pleasure,” In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985, ed. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987), 245. 30 Pollock, “Screening the seventies,” 175. 31 See John Pultz, “Introduction: The Body in Photography,” In Photography and the Body (London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995): 9-10.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 8  

is in the image as the object of consumption.32 Although art photography tries to be an

exception, the everyday experience of photographs for most people still connotes

truth and authenticity, with what is “seen” by the camera eye serving as an adequate

stand-in for what’s seen by the human eye.33 She points out that, photographs appear

to stand as evidence that whatever’s inside the frame “really” happened, was “really”

there, and, more significantly, seem to say to the spectator:

This is actual, this is how it is, you need make no effort to understand this, you have only to recognise it—isn’t this just the way you see it out there in the world?34

In photography, as Pollock states however, the subject staring back at the

viewer defies the usual hierarchy of looking and being looked at.35 Tickner reminds us

that the rejection of dominant ideologies in visual representations must not allow the

“authentic joy in the very real pleasures of the body” to be lost for fear of re-

appropriation, however, as that will only serve to further the self-loathing that women

feel towards their bodies.36 In her work, Hannah Wilke attempted to counter the

shame that women feel towards nudity, and its tendency to frighten the viewer when a

woman shows her body and is proud of it; “for then a woman exists, intensely,” as

Joanna Frueh affirms.37 Wilke’s work acted in defiance of the notion that the use of a

woman’s body in art is “problematic for feminism,” by serving to affirm the un-

ignorable presence of her own body, as alive and female.38 Carolee Schneeman, in

works such as Interior Scroll (1975) (Fig. 2) mingles personal, sexual, and artistic

                                                                                                               32 Kuhn, “Lawless Seeing,” 19, 26. 33 Kuhn, “Lawless Seeing,” 27. 34 Ibid. 35 Pollock, “Screening the seventies,” 174. 36 Tickner, “The Body Politic,” 246. 37 Joanna Frueh, “Feminism,” In Feminism Art Theory: an anthology, 1968-2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 579. 38 Ibid.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 9  

freedom in her “determination to incorporate the nude body in all” of her work.39 As

Tickner further explains:

The depiction of women by women (sometimes themselves) in this quasi-sexist manner as a political statement grows potentially more powerful as it approaches actual exploitation but then, within an ace of it, collapses into ambiguity and confusion. The more attractive the women, the higher the risk, since the more closely they approach conventional stereotypes in the first place.40

The work of artists such as Wilke, and Schneeman, and Helen Chadwick later on,

provides a necessary challenge to the “anti-pleasure rhetoric” of feminist critics such

as Pollock, Mulvey and Mary Kelly of female genital imagery. Such work, according

to them, was not “sufficiently radical” to overthrow the Western patriarchal claim to

women as bodies and objects. From their viewpoint, in the words of Catherine

Harper, the “sexual objectification of women was considered irreclaimable from men

and impossible to neutralise through feminist imagery of the female body.”41

Figure 2. Carolee Schneeman 1975 Interior Scroll.

                                                                                                               39 Carolee Schneeman quoted in: Tickner, “The Body Politic”, 246. 40 Tickner, “The Body Politic”, 246. 41 Catherine Harper, “Stewing in Her Own Juices: The Essential and Desirous Vagina (Judy Chicago and Helen Chadwick)” (master’s thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1999).

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 10  

As Kuhn points out, in reading photographs, the spectator’s act of looking is

crucial, as this is the instance where meaning is finally produced: 42

The spectator looks at the photograph, and the look of the camera is completed by the look of the spectator: the photograph says that these two looks are one and the same.43

The importance of the spectator in the production of meaning for the artwork, as also

argued by Brecht, disturbs the conventional artist/viewer power relationship. No

longer is the spectator perceived as a passive receiver of a representation, but is to be

included in the process of producing and participating in the work in order to

complete it.44 Pollock argues that, as an active producer of meaning, the viewer draws

on the social, economic, and ideological conditions of his or her life to construct a

reading of the work that is meaningful.45 The spectator needs to ask oneself what

knowledge one needs to bring to the artwork in order to share in its productivity.46

The focus is no longer strictly on the artwork as an object that creates and carries

meaning in and of itself, but to the wider context and ‘framing’ of the consumption

and production of the object.47 The spectator is then implicated in the categories and

classifications he or she chooses to impose on the image, which although the spectator

is free to re-assess or modify, as Mary Douglas notes, “the greatest comfort comes

with those classifications that ‘make sense’ and do not challenge our worldview.”48

Viewers, as part of their interpretative strategy, use frames that “create” a dominant

reading of the text, and certain texts are evaluated in certain ways because viewers

                                                                                                               42 Kuhn, “Lawless Seeing,” 27. 43 Ibid. 44 See Stephen Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” Screen 15, no.2 (1974): 111-112 45 Pollock, “Screening the seventies,” 182-3. 46 Ibid., 183. 47 Robinson, “Reframing Women,” 538. 48 Mary Douglas quoted in: Beth A. Eck. “Nudity and Framing: Classifying Art, Pornography, Information, and Ambiguity,” Sociological Forum 16, no. 4 (December 2001): 606, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 2, 2013).

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 11  

have been taught to recognise their context, their “frame.”49 In the study conducted by

Eck of the contextual “frames” used to interpret nude images, a significant number of

her respondents noted “the importance of the photographic medium that leaves the

image subject to less cultural work […] photography in the second case is a signifier

of context.”50

As even Pollock argues, it is imperative for the audience to become critical

participants in the production of new meanings, and not to remain conditioned to the

“passive pleasures of aesthetic consumption.”51 Judith Williamson, in her analysis of

Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills” and “Untitled” series (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4), presents a

clear example of the spectator’s role in constructing the meaning of a work. The

tension and sharpness in Sherman’s work is created by her leading the viewer to

construct an identity, within each image, rather than deconstructing an illusion.52 As

Judith Williamson explains of Sherman’s series:

Because the viewer is forced into complicity with the way these ‘women’ are constructed: you recognise the styles, the ‘films’, the ‘stars’, and at that moment when you recognise the picture, your reading is the picture. In a way, ‘it’ is innocent you are guilty, you supply the femininity simply through social and cultural knowledge.53

By having the audience supply the femininity ‘behind’ the photographs, through this

process of recognition, Sherman clearly demonstrates how the power of an ideology

works as Williamson describes; “the moment we recognise a ‘character’, it is as if she

must already exist.”54

                                                                                                               49 Eck, “Nudity and Framing,” 609-610. 50 Ibid., 616. 51 Pollock, “Theory and pleasure,” 247. 52 Judith Williamson, “Images of ‘woman’—the photographs of Cindy Sherman,” Screen 24, no.6 (1983): 102. 53 Williamson, “Images of ‘woman’,” 103. 54 Ibid.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 12  

Figure 3. Cindy Sherman 1979 “Untitled Film Still #27”. Figure 4. Cindy Sherman 1975 “Untitled C”. I will briefly discuss the “masquerade” of femininity here, specifically in its

application to photography, as the topic itself warrants a deeper analysis than this

paper can provide. Masquerade can effectively serve to parody the narcissism

attributed to women and to subvert the “male gaze” by consciously using or over-

using feminine props in staged photographs to undermine conventional

representations of femininity. In her work “Die Sonne und mitternacht schauen (To

look at the sun at midnight)” (1988) (Fig. 5), Katharina Sieverding photographed her

own heavily made-up face and thereby exaggerated the artificial, mask-like effect that

such a construction gives the face. In her S.O.S. Stratification Object Series (1974-

1982) (Fig. 6), Wilke photographed the process of covering her body in chewing gum

moulded into vagina-shapes in order to give a physical and visual form to the

psychological fetishization of the female body and as a process of masquerade to

escape male scrutiny.55 As John Pultz argues, a female artist can use “feminine”

accoutrements to infinitely alter her appearance, thereby allowing her to hide behind a

                                                                                                               55 See John Pultz, “Feminist Politics of Performance and Body Art,” in Photography and the Body (London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995), 129-133.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 13  

masquerade that deflects and inverts the power relationship of the “male gaze” by

constructing, through these alterations, a simulacrum, an artificial other.56 Looking

again at the work of Sherman, as interpreted by Williamson, presents another example

of how performance of the masquerade in photography can allow the female artist to

reclaim control of her representation. In her series of images of different

‘femininities’, each meant to be a different woman, Sherman actually shows that

anyone can ‘be’ all of them, and none.57 “The fact that it is Sherman performing each

time is precisely what undermines the idea that any one image is ‘her’.”58

Figure 5. Katharina Sieverding 1988 “Die Sonne und mitternacht schauen (To look at the sun at midnight)”.

Figure 6. Hannah Wilke 1974-1982 S.O.S. Stratification Object Series.

                                                                                                               56 John Pultz, “Masquerade,” in Photography and the Body (London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995), 77-78. 57 Williamson, “Images of ‘woman’,” 105. 58 Ibid.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 14  

The women in such representations are constructed; furthermore as Pultz

points out, images that are staged are a reminder that “the sentiments they express are

constructed and created, not natural or intrinsic.”59 Parker and Pollock argue that

meanings are dependent on the relationships between single images and the context of

the total cultural environment of images and social belief systems, “between what is

included in one particular image and all that is omitted.”60 When constructing a

reading of the photographic nude, Bernard Noël notes that it is “the image that makes

the body.”61 He writes:

Images trick and reassure us by drawing on reality, and while they pretend to reproduce it, they conceal within it things that remain connected to language and not to reality.62

As makers of visual imagery that use the nude female body, the danger of our

intentions being misunderstood is ever present. Such images, particularly when they

are photographs, are easily assimilated within the dominant culture of representations.

What has to be taken into consideration, however, is that it is this very cultural and

social context that is responsible for imposing certain “accepted” frames and readings

onto visual imagery. Although the responsibility lies in part with female artists to

construct images that challenge conventional interpretations, it is also the

responsibility of the spectator to become contextually aware of historical, social, and

cultural references in order for them to be active participants in producing new

meanings and new contexts for works that represent female bodies. Without the

audience, the dialogue that feminist art seeks to instigate is incomplete.

   

                                                                                                               59 John Pultz, Photography and the Body (London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995), 109. 60 Parker and Pollock, “Section I,” 125. 61 Bernard, Noël,”The Eye’s Touch,” in The Nude (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1990), 5. 62 Ibid.

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 15  

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1970,” Art History 1, no. 2 (June 1978): 236-251. http://faculty.winthrop.edu/stockk/Contemporary%20Art/tickner%20female%20sexuality.pdf (accessed January 6, 2013).

Williamson, Judith. “Images of ‘woman’—the photographs of Cindy Sherman,”

Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 102-116. Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at City University, London (accessed January 15, 2013).

Reclaiming Visual and Visceral Pleasure Fjodorova 17  

LIST OF WORKS

Figures

1. Albrecht Dürer 1525 Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman. 8 x 22 cm. Woodcut. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.  http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/d/durer/2/12/9_1528/5draught.html

2. Carolee Schneeman 1975 Interior Scroll. http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/368/flashcards/402368/jpg/schneeman_interior_scroll_doc_19751317611105783.jpg

3. Cindy Sherman 1979, reprinted 1998 “Untitled Film Still #27”. 975 x 683

mm. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper. Tate, London. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sherman-untitled-film-still-27-p11517

4. Cindy Sherman 1975 “Untitled C”. 418 x 283 mm. Photograph, gelatin silver

print on paper. Tate, London. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sherman-untitled-c-p11439

5. Katharina Sieverding 1988 Die Sonne und mitternacht schauen (To look at the

sun at midnight). 149 5/8 x 241 1/8 in. C-print, acrylic, steel. http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/106

6. Hannah Wilke 1974-1982 S.O.S. Stratification Object Series. 10 Photographs,

silver gelatin prints and 15 chewing gum sculptures mounted on board. Museum of Modern Art, New York. http://www.hannahwilke.com/id6.html