Women artists are taking control over their bodies and becoming overt exhibitionists. Joan Smith investigates
Two women, two photographs. One shows a model in a dark tunic, her face turned blankly away from the camera, her raised hands holding apart the edges of a fur cape that frames the luminous V of her cleavage. In the other, the sitter’s head has been excluded and only her torso is visible, clothed in a plain blue dress through which one of her nipples is glowingly apparent. Similar in theme, both saying something about women’s bodies, the two pictures could not be more different in intention or effect.
The first, a recent fashion shot of the English supermodel Stella Tennant for the couturier Karl Lagerfeld, is a routine example of male appropriation of the female body, right down to the focus on, but continuing concealment of, Tennant’s breasts. It says a great deal about Lagerfeld’s concept of glamour, and its relation to gender and class, but very little about Tennant as anything other than the passive vehicle of his fantasies.
The second, a partial self-portrait by the young Swiss photographer Marianne Muller, challenges this tired old aesthetic with an image that triumphantly exposes what, in Lagerfeld’s photograph, cannot be shown – the erect female nipple.
Ironically, it is Lagerfeld’s portrait of Tennant that objectifies the female body. By contrast, Muller’s image of herself may be headless but it is certainly not passive. There is no doubt that this breaking of boundaries on Muller’s part is deliberate: the subjects of her photographs include other parts of her own body, her discarded clothes lying on a chair, a soiled dress lying in a bathtub. “I am interested,” she says, “in the transition from private to erotic, to things that are public and of general validity. Shooting pictures influences and changes everyday rituals through the act of observing them.”
“Woman,” according to the art historian Marcia Pointon in her book Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1908, can “be understood in representation to signify not only the objectified female body that constitutes art but also the very creativity through which it comes about and which is male.”
Many of the creations of contemporary woman artists, from Tracey Emin’s tent inscribed with the names of her ex-lovers to Cindy Sherman’s early images of herself, are famous and controversial. Some defiantly challenge potent cultural taboos.
Neither tasteful nor saccharine, they call for complex readings and suggest the existence of an emerging female art form that might be categorised as a transgressive voyeurism of the self.
What is going on here? What happens when a woman artist invites an audience – many of whom have traditional expectations of the meaning of certain types of female images – to look at her clothed or unclothed body in a context that is frankly sexual? Can she transcend the prejudices of her audience? Is there anything in the charge that these artists are merely out to shock, or can we make a genuine distinction between exhibitionism and self- exposure?
Finding answers to these questions is made more difficult by the existence of a cultural trend that encourages women to reveal as much about themselves as possible.
From the late princess of Wales to the fictional Bridget Jones, we have come to expect access to the most intimate details of women’s lives, to a degree that would have been unthinkable even two decades ago. We are intimately acquainted with the problems of total strangers.
It might be argued that the work of Marianne Muller and Cindy Sherman is more instructive than, say, the princess of Wales’s apparently revelatory Panorama interview. Nearly 20 years ago, in her groundbreaking book The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, Germaine Greer suggested that “the neurosis of the artist is of a very different kind from the carefully cultured self-destructiveness of women” – a phrase that sums up much of what passes for frankness in our obsessively confessional culture.
When a female celebrity gives an interview to Hello! magazine, and takes the opportunity to talk about her latest lover or her most recent divorce, she naturally paints herself in the best possible light.
The first thing to be said about the work of contemporary women artists is that it is aware of the old “trope of exclusion”, in Marcia Pointon’s phrase, which made the status of their predecessors so precarious – and discouraged them from taking risks in their representation of themselves or indeed other women.
When Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth Vige-Le Brun, Giovanna Fratellina and Angelica Kaufmann embarked on self-portraits, they painted themselves fully clothed (of course) and surrounded by the tools of their trade in working poses that reinforced the traditional separation between artist and artist’s model.
It is a striking, though hardly surprising, fact about these women that they so rarely attempted what was in many ways the classic painter’s subject: the female nude. The profession and the female body, were equally the province of men and the consequences of breaking the latter taboo remained, for most female artists, unthinkable.
Greer argued in The Obstacle Race that it was these cultural constraints, deeply internalised, that prevented the emergence of a female equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci or Nicolas Poussin. “You cannot make great artists out of egos that have been damaged, with wills that are defective, with libidos that have been driven out of reach and energy diverted into neurotic channels.”
This judgment sounds harsh, but it places the art in a context that allows us to recognise the sheer effort required, even in the 20th-century, to turn this situation on its head. The very act of doing it is iconoclastic, and that consciousness may well push women artists into ever more daring explorations of the female body.
At the same time, we, as viewers, have the entire history of western art on our shoulders, telling us we should be shocked – or, at the very least, that there is something innovative, radical and dangerous about the work these women are producing.
This is perfectly true, as is the likelihood that some of it will say unpalatable things about women, female identity and sexuality. It is certainly venturing into an area – the nature of female desire and the pleasure women take in their own and other women’s bodies – that makes many observers extremely uncomfortable.
For most of us, men and women alike, our bodies are at the centre of the world, even if we understand them in different ways. In this context, self-exposure by female artists becomes not a form of exhibitionism but a conscious act of reclaiming.
It is not Marianne Muller’s photograph of her iridescent nipple that should shock us but the way male artists have assumed – and go on assuming, as Karl Lagerfeld’s sepia- tinted fantasies about Stella Tennant reveal – that they have unquestioned rights over the representation of women.