Nudes and Bare Naked Women

by

Jeanne Marie Wasilik

 

Lately when I think of feminism in art I find myself thinking back to Olympia by Manet. The painting marks an unprecedented rupture in centuries-old conventions governing the display of the female body for male delectation. Not until the 1960s and 70s when feminists began to call attention to the objectification of the female body were the politics of the gaze called broadly into question. It’s interesting to remember that Carolee Schneemann played the part of Olympia in Robert Morris’s 1964 performance Site. In photographs from the piece Schneemann seems a near perfect body-double, with perhaps the exception of her gaze. One can imagine that especially in a work by the macho Morris, it had been difficult to duplicate the autonomy and challenge of the original Olympia’s forthright look—a look that nails the viewer and undresses his presumptions of privilege.

Schneemann of course went on to robustly challenge conventions of erotic display in her own performances. One can’t miss the Dionysian abandon in her reclamation of the female body from centuries of strictures that prescribed how it would be pictured, by and for whom, and doing what. Like Schneemann, Hannah Wilke also used her own body as the site to challenge masculine definitions of the feminine. Wilke specifically characterized her work as “respecting the objecthood of the body.” Rather than shrinking from the notion of the female body as object, Wilke claimed it as territory for women’s discourse. Schneemann and Wilke stood up, naked, and made themselves visible as women against centuries of images of the female nude. In the process they forced the realization of how pervasive and unexamined the objectification of women’s bodies was.

But we are in a different historical moment today, when such a stance can only be confounded by a hall of mirrors, given the domineering power of image qua image. It’s as if getting naked were less possible today as a critical and feminist act—although there are notable exceptions in works by artists such as Marina Abramovic and Andrea Fraser.

Indicative of much of the current mood is a 1998 photograph by Sam Taylor-Wood titled Soliloquy III, which shows a woman as an unabashed nude, reclining, her back to us in an imitation of Velásquez’s delectable Rokeby Venus. Like the Velásquez, her face is reflected in a mirror and her eyes constitute no challenge. In fact, her self-absorbed gaze signals her daydreaming, and in a lower panel we get to see what presumably has her imagination captured. Below (in a reference to predella panels) is a scene showing groups of clean and cleanly lit figures vaguely engaged in various stages of display and coitus. It would be a voyeur’s jackpot if it weren’t for the strangely enervated atmosphere of it all. In the end what we are dealing with is indeed a soliloquy, and a murmured one at that, which reestablishes the privilege of the gaze. The question becomes, whose gaze is reaffirmed here and to what end?

In discussing the work of Taylor-Wood and other women, Linda Nochlin speaks of their tapping into the “afterlife” of classical images of Western art and sees current feminists as appropriating these tropes to continue a critique of representations of women. But, as Nochlin would admit and embrace, the polemics of feminism have broadened beyond their initial focus, which tended to pose issues in terms of stark oppositions. The result is a complication of what ends “respecting the objectification of the body” might now serve. This statement alone constituted a challenge when Wilke first made it because there was a wholly intact opposition to engage, the total dominance of male control over images of women. There has also been a further, subtler change in context: As Thomas Crow has argued, the legacy of “the presence of moral commitment” that had remained a defining subtext in the public function of art into the 1960s and 70s had become remote by the mid-80s. Crow speaks of the newly “private terms” of images that evidence “a resigned submission to the already existing.”

I am not arguing that we should try to impose lost legacies, even if we could. Still, the lack of challenge, of energy itself, in Taylor-Wood’s Soliloquy III seems symptomatic of a kind of critical impasse. The question of whose gaze might be reaffirmed becomes moot in the face of its aura of unperturbed narcissism. This seems its truest point, the gaze turned on its own image.