Quiet
by John Calcutt
...awareness of sexual difference has generally
been registered through special attention being given
to the feminine side of the equation. Woman is seen
as other and as relative to man. Where the male is the
norm, the female constitutes the deviation. There is
a good deal in such assertions, which can readily be
backed up with examples drawn from Western philosophy
of virtually any period beginning with the classical
era. But there is also a partial truth here. […]
If we start with a strong commitment to ‘gender’
rather than ‘women’ as the key analytical
term, we find that not only should both men and women,
their experience, representation and their visual culture
be considered, but also that masculinity is a contested
term, in ways that are inevitably entangled with the
ways in which femininity is contested. (Ludmilla
Jordanova)
Each tightly cropped, cut and sharp. We slice and frame
the continuum of the world the better to control it.
We define beginnings and endings, borders and limits.
Having thus imposed a conceptual (and essentially spatial)
order upon experience, we are then convinced that this
scheme is part of a natural order and are fearful of
its contradiction. Men are strong, women gentle. We
are secure and content in our belief that the world
itself suggests these self-evident truths. We do not
need to be constantly alert to the intellectual or conceptual
aspects of this regulatory system because, finally,
this is how the world is pictured, this is how it looks,
this is how it appears to be. Men produce, women consume.
We may be dealing with mythological structures here,
but they are pervasive. It is difficult, if not impossible,
to live beyond their reach. They provide the conceptual
and moral foundations for legal and educational systems,
the mass media, culture, sports; etc. And there is no
beyond to the ideological universe they define. To imagine
ourselves free of this ideological universe is mere
wishful thinking. Nevertheless, this universe contains
contradictions, fault lines and inconsistencies to be
explored by those with a critical will.
The artist is crucial here. It is often thought that
the purpose of art is to reflect reality. This presumes,
however, that reality is a given - part of the natural
order rather than an ideological construct of the kind
suggested here. It presupposes, moreover, that art has
a passive relation to any such ‘given’ reality.
Better, perhaps, to recognise that: “Representation...is
not...neutral; it is an act...of power in our culture.”
1 Speaking of advertisements (although her comments
can be extended to cover all visual imagery), Gillian
Dyer notes that we may easily assume that there is a
simple and better reality with which to replace the
stereotypes and myths that we find within them. To do
so, however, would be to ignore “the fact that
ads themselves are a kind of reality which have an effect.
In this sense ads are not secondary to ‘real life’
nor copied or derived from it. [They are] ‘specific
representational practices’ and produce meanings
which cannot be found in reality. There is no simple
reality with which to replace the falseness of ads,
and there are no simple alternatives to stereotypes.”
2 The more we consider Webster’s images with
Eagleton’s critique in mind, the more aware we
become of the very fragility of that masculinity which
first appeared so unproblematic. This is not simply
a question of the palpable sense of physical duress
evident in these images of men - of the sweat, the exhaustion,
the slumped look of defeat. Nor is it simply a matter
of the isolation of these male figures, their silent,
solitary suffering in a black and placeless void.
All that we can know about these anonymous male figures
derives from what we can see. We see a fragment of their
bodies. To us, who know them only by these images, they
are their bodies: muscled and battered. These are worked
bodies, bodies defined through exertion. To an extent,
at least, we are looking at unclothed muscle and therefore
at a kind of naked power. But this is a strange kind
of power. Power is a force exerted in order to transform
and produce, yet these figures are not doing anything
productive. They may be, as suggested earlier, boxers,
their faces thickened by blows received, their shoulders
strengthened by blows delivered. Such men work hard,
hour after hour in the gymnasium, mile upon mile on
the road. And the object of this relentless effort,
all this gruelling labour, is their own body. They are
their own product; their physical exertions only increases
their capacity for physical exertion. We might go so
far as to say that their enterprise is fuelled by a
narcissistic drive, as they address themselves (their
bodies) to themselves (their bodies). These men are
subjects (they are each an “I”), but, through
physical training, they also treat themselves as objects
(they also appear to themselves as a “you”).
Their selfhood, in fact, is divided. They prepare themselves
to meet opponents who are caught within the same circular
routine, each developing similar power and skills for
the sake of athletic superiority.
Such narcissism - such self-directed endeavour - is
conventionally associated with the feminine. The feminine,
it is widely believed, has no essence, has no core of
truth: it resides primarily in appearance, in what some
have termed “looked-at-ness.” Thus the task
of femininity is the maintenance of the appearance of
femininity. “The reader may ask,” the psychoanalyst
Joan Riviére wrote in her 1929 essay ‘Womanliness
as Masquerade’, “how I define womanliness
or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness
and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not,
however, that there is any such difference; whether
radical or superficial, they are the same thing. “
By focusing upon the aestheticisation of male labour
(looking at the signs of that labour, and suggesting
that those signs are also its principal products), Webster
unsettles one of the age-old stereotypes of masculinity.
She performs a similar act in her treatment of the signs
of femininity. Where the labour of men has been conventionally
associated with construction and production, that of
women has been associated with embellishment and consumption
(the decoration of surfaces, embroidery, shopping, cooking,
etc.). Embroidery, in particular, is/was often thought
to embody such characteristically feminine traits as
patience and the possession of delicate hand skills.
Through embroidery the female personalizes the domestic
space and her personal In Quiet, Christine Webster’s
recent series of photographic works, we can observe
some of the ways in which the image may be critically
turned upon itself to destabilise the function of the
stereotype. We may be struck initially, for example,
by the diptych format employed by Webster. Each work
in the series comprises two juxtaposed images: a close-up
detail of decorated fabric, and a dramatically lit shot
of the face and bare shoulders of a male figure. We
immediately apprehend something about the nature of
these different yet related images: habit suggests that
they represent “femininity” and “masculinity.”
The male figures, we notice, appear rugged, athletic
and ‘hard’. Something suggests that they
may be boxers. Not only are they images of particular
men, they are also images of a certain kind of generalised
‘manhood’.
By contrast, there is no female presence in the accompanying
images. In reading these images of embroidered fabric
as ‘feminine’, we are reliant solely upon
a chain of conventional associations that links such
concepts as decoration, domesticity and malleability
to the ‘feminine’. In reading the images
this way we are reliant upon an unexamined assumption
that masculinity is somehow predicated upon “presence”,
whereas femininity may be identified as a form of “absence”.
The laws of a binary logic are in operation whereby
masculinity and femininity are seen to stand in a relation
of mutual definition through paired sets of oppositions
and differences. But, as Terry Eagleton demonstrates,
things may not be so straightforward:
[F]or male-dominated society, man is the founding
principle and woman the excluded opposite of this; and
as long as such a distinction is tightly held in place
the whole system can function effectively. ‘Deconstruction’
is the name given to the critical operation by which
such oppositions can be partly undermined, or by which
they can be shown to undermine each other [...]. Woman
is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she
is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative
value in relation to the male first principle. But equally
man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting
out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis
to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up
and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks
to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is
not just an other in the sense of something beyond his
ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image
of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder
of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as
he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity
to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own
being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon
the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one
reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she
may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands
as a sign of something in man himself which he needs
to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to
a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits.
Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what
is alien also intimate - so that man needs to police
the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly
as he does just because it may always be transgressed,
has always been transgressed already, and is much less
absolute than it appears.”
3 appearance. Its repetitive and painstaking techniques
were regarded as an ideal, non-taxing way for a woman
to occupy her mind. Absorbed in the private process
of embroidery, the woman was ‘protected’
from those harsh realities that were man’s concern
alone. What is immediately apparent in the embroidered
patterns that appear in Webster’s images, however,
is that they have been mass-produced by means of machine
technology. The nature of the labour involved in producing
these decorative items is far removed from that which
tied the female to her domestic introspection. The decorative
crafts (coded as feminine) and industrial production
(coded as masculine) are now intermingled in such a
way as to become inseparable, no longer capable of mutual
definition through binary opposition.
“The body,” according to Michel Foucault,
“ ...is directly involved in a political field;
power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they
invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to
carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”4
Now, Webster seems to suggest, the disciplinary powers
exerted on the male body come not from some external
source, but internally, so to speak, from within a divided
self. Masculinity is as subject to those same processes
as traditionally employed to define and control the
feminine. The demand for muscle-backed physical labour
- whilst not disappearing entirely - has fallen dramatically.
The post-industrial age is the age of information and
of the image. Largely divorced from its connection to
economic productivity, the physical power invested in
a man’s body diverts itself into the image. Musculature
is now developed as much for its aesthetic potential
and spectacular display as for its economic value as
a productive energy source. This culture of the spectacular
body (the cult of the gymnasium) coincides with that
historical moment where the male body itself as a site
of production has been left stranded. The toned and
muscled male body is now conceived of as an image-product
and, therefore, as an object of consumption, thereby
entering that territory conventionally associated with
the feminine. The emptied signs of feminine labour,
meanwhile, drift quietly into the masculine territory
of industrial production, ghostly reminders of a fading
past.
© John Calcutt 2004. Senior Lecturer, Historical
and Critical Studies, Glasgow School of Art, from the
catalogue for Quiet, Adam Art Gallery and Sarjeant Art
Gallery, NZ
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