Photographer: Gregory Brown
My injury is slowly healing - oh, we do need both our hands, there is no doubt! I find it hard not to use my left hand at all. I am housebound. Fortunately, Christmas is coming up and having finally given up on the idea of travelling - too complicated with a plaster, and airlines insist on it being cut, which defeats the purpose of wearing it, I am not wasting away precious time. I can be at home, relax and plan for future work.
The enforced rest has been useful, I have done more online curatorial work for the deviantArt groups I am involved with and am planning my DMP essay whose deadline is early February, as well as my next term teaching. A lot of reading these days can be done online, through ebraries. When I was a postgraduate student back in the early 1990s I used to live in libraries. Now the whole pattern of studies has changed, if you know what you are looking for, you can access it easily on the internet. Even then, nothing beats the pleasure of finding books on an open shelf library and skim read them while crouching next to a whole line of shelves, so as soon as it is feasible I will go and visit one of the big libraries in town.
Yesterday I put together a gallery show with the help of a guest curator for the wonderful Art Express group. It was about the body as art, in the figurative arts and in photography. The images selected by Elly are stunning. I wrote a short introduction to the show and I immediately started asking myself questions on the classical view of the body in art, especially the female nude. I decided I'd write a blog post about it and revisited classic texts such as Kenneth Clark's The Nude and Lynda Nead's The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality - the two have to be read in conjunction, at least that was the way I read them when I first encountered them in 1992.
Photographer: Suki Wilde
It took me all back. Clark's study of the nude in the Western tradition is well known. He distinguishes between the naked and the nude body and sets the parameters for the investigation of the nude. The post 1960s feminist scholarship of Nead, Nochlin and Mulvey challenged the neutrality and the aesthetic innocence of Clark's nude, introducing the notion of a male gaze (which later Mulvey revised, paying more attention to the female gaze). And then there was Camille Paglia.
A maverick, as she has often been described, she went against the excesses of the feminist movement, and often made statements against its leaders, writing
"Students who read Clark will be safely inoculated against the worst excesses of feminist theory, with its prattle about objectification and the male gaze—terms cooked up by ideologues with glaringly little knowledge of or feeling for art."
Strong views indeed, which have infuriated critics and delighted admirers. Paglia celebrated the Dionysian, the wilder and darker side of human sexuality, and its expression in art. For all her 'neo-conservatism', hers is actually a reclamation of what was historically intended for men - the display of eroticism and an explicit sexuality.
Photographer: David Nuttall
So my original reflections on the nude have led me again to Sexual Personae , Paglia's first book!
Paglia is still very active, and recently published a book about poetry, Break, Blow, Burn. But this is indeed a topic for another post.
Meanwhile, you can have a glimpse of the great lady in the video-clip below , while I immerse myself in Sexual Personae.
I certainly admire Paglia for her rejection of those earlier sexually conservative feminists and the male gaze (which, as a man who gazes, would certainly be offensive to me regardless). But I have been wary of her for a number of reasons.
ReplyDeleteIt was strange that I didn't end up reading Paglia in my courses on Fine Arts and Cultural Studies (which was secret code for "Post modernism is great, Colonialism is bad, and women who don't shave their armpits will one day rule the world after converting the male population into sperm supplying drones").
I read Paglia in my creative writing course, where I was assigned (go figure) Break, Blow Burn as required reading. Of course, it's an anthology, so mostly just the essays after each poem are by her. My mother, coincidentally, bought the book for pleasure - which brings me to what I find unsettling about Paglia.
She represents a form of sexual positivity that is appealing to women who come from a generation that wanted to justify their own sexual liberation in the face of certain second wave sects of feminism. As somebody who is the child of one of those women, it shouldn't be surprising that I consider some of the extents to which sex positivity goes in pursuit of its goals as being excessive.
I appreciate the embrace of sexuality and eroticism as part of a woman's power (or anybody's power, really), but I can't help but think the self-help saturated, incense stinking world this philosophy lives in shares its roots with the waste of time that was the hippie movement, those who think recreational drugs are an important part of a life that puts recreation above most other things, and the "everything is acceptable, and you're a jerk for thinking otherwise" mentality.
Which is to say, wide reaching acceptance is nice and all, and expressing sexuality is grand - but there are limits to the viability of these things when you take them off of paper, and the meaning behind sexual experiences is lost, and teaching oneself to eschew emotional ties for the sake of pleasure is prized.
... I've spent a very long time writing this comment, and yet I feel like it's probably moot.
I suppose to sum up, I should say that I think Paglia has been an important stepping stone AWAY from something I consider very negative, but it will be up to someone else to change the direction she pointed us to somewhere more appropriate. (I realize that I've oversimplified paglia's work significantly here, for the sake of a rant).
There is more to Paglia than meets the eye. When I first read her I found her impossibly opinionated but I did admire her scholarship, very evident in Sexual Personae. I am now rereading Sexual Personae and I find it fascinating for its incredibly bold statements, thinking back how bold they were back in 1990. She is one of the first and most outspoken sex positive feminists.
ReplyDeleteIt is Elizabeth Grosz that has led me back to Paglia. Grosz' essay "Animal sex: Libido as Desire and death" is challenging. Current debates on the legitimacy of BDSM practices can be better understood when framed by the post-feminist dicourse on sexuality.
Your work as a curator has given DA some truly fine art exhibits, much needed and so very much appreciated, Alex. Thank you so much!
ReplyDeleteWhile on the DA topic, did you see Audrey's (Decogoddess) post today on fine art nudes as butchered meat? You really must. One of us should answer to it.