1st Global Conference
Thursday 14th October - Saturday
16th October 2004
Salzburg, Austria
Session 5a: Sexualities
and the Visual Arts I
Chair: Nicholas Rumens
Woman, Peasant, Lady in 19th Century Greek Painting;
Why Does Sexuality Matter?
Glafki Gotsi,
Thessaloniki, Greece
About the year 1885 the well known and highly appreciated
Greek artist Nikiphoros Lytras (1832-1904) painted his ‘Bathing
Young Woman from Megara’. The iconographic conventions of the
painting would have it integrated into the so-called rural genre, a
thematic category considered by art historians a very popular one at
that time, since, as it has been maintained, it expressed ideas and
feelings about a distinct national identity and the pleasures of a
common present for the Greek people. Almost no attention has been paid
however to other aspects of this type of painting, some of which are
discussed in this paper.
The paper explores the role of sexuality,
in its interconnections with class and gender, in the production and
reception of works of art. Close examination of genre paintings (starting
with the work of Lytras as a typical example), accompanied by comparison
with works from other thematic categories, e.g. portraiture, and analysis
of contemporary texts, critical, literary and other, will illustrate
the various and often reciprocally related meanings implicated in artistic
representations at a certain historical moment of Greece’s transition
to a specific type of modernity.
In what way may some representations
render the female body the locus of sexual interest? What does nakedness
of certain parts of the female body, like feet or hands, signify in
this period in Greece and to what extend can it be read in relation
to theories of sexuality, for instance Freud’s theory on fetishism?
What kind of analogies and discrepancies are there between representations
of peasant women and representations of bourgeois ladies in 19th century
Greek painting and how can they be interpreted with regard to the gradual
formation of a modern sexual identity for the Greek male subject? These
are the main questions raised throughout the paper.
The Face, The Flesh, The Cut
Robert Summers
Department of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
I
am looking at Opie's 1994 'Self-Portrait/Pervert', which shows the
artist wearing a S/M mask (a second skin) and who has intricate cuts
on her full, fleshy, white body. Above her breasts,
in an arch shape, the word 'Pervert' has been inscribed, and under
this word are two incised decorative plant and branch motifs, which
echo the shape of her breasts. Both inscriptions are fresh, and
they are still red with beads of blood that are attempting to coagulate
and turn to scabs and then to scars. Nearing the top of the photograph,
the woman's face is concealed by a black leather facemask; thus, we
are refused the pleasure of seeing her face. This photograph relates
to a number of Opie's early self-portraits in which the artist complicates
and confuses the genre and aim of documentary photography and self-portraiture.
As
I read this photograph, the artist presents and conceals herself; she
is present and yet absent; she perverts ... she is a pervert, as the
scarification states. But via her presentation of self, cannot
be objectified because she cannot be 'known'. Indeed, she queers what
photographic portraiture and documentation ostensibly set out to do
-- mark the subject, make them an object of knowledge, and tie them
into a system that refuses difference. Without a doubt, Opie
perverts the aforementioned art historical and photographic genres
in provocative ways, and the 'Self-Portrait/Pervert' photograph is
but one example.
During Opie's early artistic practice and production,
the queer, LA-based photographer took many self-portraits that placed
her firmly in the queer communities that she has consistently photographed, “for
example, her critically acclaimed 'Being and Having' portrait series
that presents queers of all sorts and styles, and where the artist
is seen in male drag performing her other self, Bo, the butch biker,
and, as another example, in her new series titled 'Lesbian Pietas'
-- which show lesbian mothers and their newborns in ways that pervert
the sanctity and piety of the traditional Madonna and Christ pose.
Thus,
it is these portraits and self-portraits, which I read as queer performative
constructions, that enact how queers, perverts, destabilize fixed genres,
fields, and disciplines. In this paper, I will
view the picture plane, the photographic paper, as well as the flesh
(of the bodies and the photographs), as a theatrical space that opens
itself up to various enactments and projections of particularity and
otherness. Furthermore, I will argue that Opie's (self-)portraits,
specifically her flesh and the flesh of others, can be read as ethical
foregroundings of particular bodies/selves that exasperates the historical
binaries of subject/object, self/other, and art/life. I will use Opie's
photographs as a case study for a strategic and embodied queer ethical
and political project in contemporary photographic (self-) portraiture,
which comes from a larger project that I am currently calling 'queer
visualities' “which examines images and performances
that foreground the degraded, the perverted, and the marginal as sites
that open up and out art, life, gender, sex, sexuality, and race in
and around art history and visual culture.
Fearful Symmetery- Representation, Feminism,
and Hyperfiction: Towards a Theory of Multi-Mimesis
Jessica Laccetti
Royal Holloway, University of London
If Romanticism was marked by a
concern for the “materiality
of the text,” and postmodernism, in Baudrillardian terms, represents
an emptying out of materiality, then contemporary hypertext narratives
present profound implications for the future of textuality. As Odin
notes, “Promoters of cyberspace thus set up a dichotomy between
the virtual and the material world, describing-it in terms of literally
freeing mind from the body into invisible virtual spaces.”Contrary
to the arguments of hypertext theorists, who see electronic media
as perfectly malleable and moveable ones and zeros (a prime example
of the textuality of online media), multimedia content is often more
forcefully connected to the material world of technology and software
than the printed word is to the page.
Rather than pursuing reductionist
theories which examine the limits of print in relation to hypertext,
such as those declared by Landow, Bolter, Moulthrop et al., this
paper proposes a re-imagining of a particular critical tool, mimesis,
in light of current female-authored hyperfiction.
Instead of stating
(or overstating) the differences between print and hyper-mediums and
their instantiations of textuality, identity, and representation, it
is my intention to illustrate how new figurations of mimesis may indeed
be beneficial as tools for hyperfiction interpretation.
My paper will
endeavour to present the following issues:
1.
The postmodern tendency,
from structuralism onwards, has been to call what Docherty calls the
reality-principle into question.More
specifically, postmodern theory provides a critique of representation
and the belief that literature mirrors reality, and that all cognitive
representations of the world are historically and linguistically
mediated. In Andrew Gibson’s terms postmodern mimesis ushers
in a new thinking of mimesis as a “double bind,” mimesis
and anti-mimesis together. Furthermore its constant and critical
questioning of traditional mimesis as imitation of reality points
in a new direction for mimesis: “to think mimesis and anti-mimesis
together, as intertwined parts of a puzzle.”
2.
With the advent of hyperfictions which make use of a myriad of
representational devices such as text, graphics, video, sound, and
where hypertext structure itself inaugurates a new reading mode saturated
in multiplicity, (the plethora of possible paths through a narrative)
mimesis as representation of reality coupled with a postmodern scepticism
becomes insufficient and inadequate. Therefore a new literary tool,
multi-mimesis, can be theorised with respect to the presentation
of female “becoming” experiences.
3.
A theorising of multi-mimesis
from a feminist perspective with a focus on multiplicity (of subjectivity,
narrative and representational modes), dynamics, “becoming,” (in
Braidotti’s terms),
parody (as Hutcheon’s postmodern subversion), in an effort
for female hyperfiction authors to not only “bear witness” to
their lives but to authorise them and their concurrent telling and
showing.
4.
Multi-mimesis in action – a short set of examples
of how multi-mimesis is employed in contemporary hyperfictions such
as Wendy Battin’s Shoen Tell, Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger,
(the world’s first hyperfiction).