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Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art
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INTRODUCTION
There is no such thing as the ideal female body. Even the old masters would
have agreed that an ideal is a concept not a thing. Some of the famous nudes
in art history were thought to be near-perfect configurations of the ideal female
form. For instance, Venus de Milo was sculpted for the citizens of Ancient
Greece according to the Classical ideal of bodily perfection, and nearly 2,000
years later, Botticelli’s Venus of Urbino was painted as a Renaissance version
of this ideal for the Medici princes. Executed in a representational style, both
works of art served for centuries as interpretations of the ideal, and were
endlessly copied in art. Popular fashion and pornography provided a succes-
sion of specific cultural fantasies of the female body, which ran parallel to and
intersected with this high-art industry. In being sanctified as art, however, ‘the
nude’ became singular, academic, historical and exclusive, a myth that was
disqualified as a standard that might be applied to living bodies.
In our own century, the goddesses of the silver screen displaced this high-
art tradition, adding voice, movement and the illusion of a closer link to real
bodies, while seducing mass audiences on an unprecedented scale. Despite their
international fame, few stars from this glittering constellation stand out or are
remembered as approximating to the ideal. This may be because movies fracture
the woman’s body to focus on the face or some erotic part, or because even
film stars are condemned to be victims of changing fashion, tarnished with the
aura of mortality. Occasionally, as in the case of Marilyn Monroe, who was
acclaimed as the ideal of her day, personal tragedy and premature death
confirmed this aura. It was as though the designation or symbolisation of a
woman’s body as ideal forced recognition that her body was only too real and
particular, a material fact that would soon ‘turn to dust’. In spite of this – or
perhaps because of it – Marilyn’s image achieved the status of a myth. It was
repeated in the prints of Andy Warhol and simulated in the performances of
Madonna, thus spawning ever-new formations of iconic, feminine beauty.
Though nudes may belong to history and film stars may be destined for the
graveyards of the rich and famous, now fashion magazines, video clips and other
forms of popular visual culture dominate unchecked as the purveyors of body
image. The ‘ideal female body’ has become a marketing strategy, and as such
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it has made international corporations richer than any Ancient Greek or
Renaissance prince. Women still try to improve their bodies, but instead of
emulating a goddess or saint, they ‘work out’ according to a promotional theme.
Sanctioned by medical science, the ‘fit body’ drives an industry of gymnasia and
sporting products, while ‘the healthy body’ sustains a vast range of pharmaceu-
tical and health-care products. The ‘beautiful body’ adds cosmetics and plastic
surgery to both of these. Sometimes the themes clash or become confused. Jane
Fonda’s ‘fit body’, for example, turned out to be bulimic and therefore not
healthy. ‘The healthy body’, it seems, was not slim enough to qualify also as ‘the
beautiful body’. It is in the interests of late capitalism to perpetuate this sort
of ambiguity, to promote thinness in a culture where obesity is more common
and the weight-loss industry prospers. The slim, fit body has become a symbol
of self-discipline, and a passport to social and cultural power, but the control
required of the individual to maintain it comes at a cost. By inducing women to
strive with all their purchasing power towards an ideal that is difficult, elusive
and obscure, capitalism ensures that the threat of failure is maintained and the
purchasing is never exhausted. On the other hand, recognising that achieving
this ideal is more difficult for some than for others, it adjusts the ideal to be more
global and inclusive, thus breaking down sexual and cultural boundaries. The
promotion of ‘the anorectic body’, ‘the waif’, ‘the heroin body’, and ‘the dead
body’ is the perverse side to this inclusiveness.
Running parallel to this discourse on the ideal female body is a shorter narra-
tive of resistance. Feminist artists have challenged the patriarchal ideal in art
as well as commercial norms of feminine beauty. In the 1960s and 1970s,
some attempted to replace the Classical ideal of the female body with a positive,
feminist ideal, symbolising it with images of the archaic goddess whose maternal
body was tied spiritually and essentially to Nature and the Earth. While these
images were powerful in some ways, it was not long before they looked anachro-
nistic and crude. Intellectually sophisticated, contemporary women of the early
1980s were uncomfortable with the murky namelessness of maternity, which
many of them associated with the sentimentality of regressive artistic modes,
particularly painting. These mainly poststructuralist feminists took a different
line of attack, re-deploying techniques and images from popular media as well
as from modernist art to deconstruct images that had been constructed
according to the ‘patriarchal’ ideal. Barbara Kruger defaced patriarchal repre-
sentations of the female body in order to obstruct the (male) gaze of the
spectator, but did not indicate a positive viewing position for women, or an
artistic direction that might lead to positive representations of the female body.
Positivity itself was distrusted, as was the sense of sight that established an
image or the thing it represents as real.
This was not a crisis for the visual arts so much as a crisis for representation
and for the status of the real. It was said that Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills showed
that her self-presentations, as ‘woman’, were constituted in and produced by
images in the visual media and popular culture, that they were not constructed
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from reality through representation, but were instead simulations that had no
attachment to reality. Sherman counted herself as a performance artist, however,
and managed to keep the body in art, emphasising the processes of making and
enactment. Some artists, such as Karen Finley, used their bodies-in-performance
to displace the patriarchal ideal, by resisting stereotypes of femininity and trans-
gressing gendered constructions of the female body. In staging the ‘obscene
body’, and joking about it, ‘bad girls’ wanted to have it both ways: to shatter
binaries but ‘reclaim’ their bodies and erotic power.
A new typology of ambiguous bodies emerged: the ‘androgynous body’, the
‘hybrid body’, the ‘abject body’ and the ‘post-human body’. These exposed
the constructedness of femininity, the performativity of gender and sex, and
the hollowness of identity as an ideal. The irony of this feminist narrative,
however, is that the women who were opposed to the death of identity were
often not patriarchal idealists, but those whom feminism should want to defend.
Artists who are positioned as ‘Other’, on account of their race, class, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, disability or physical difference asserted ‘their own’ identities
in political statements against the white, middle-class norm. On the other hand
it has been argued that with the advances of technology and the globalisation
of culture, hybridisation collapses the old distinctions based on race, class and
sexuality, and renders obsolete that which was once human. Hence, while some
feminist artists sought to foreground the real in some new way, cyberfeminists
and post-humanists redefined the ideal of a female body as one that transcends
binaries and embraces artificiality through fiction.
Although this book does not insist that the above narratives about the female
body in representation are either correct or comprehensive, it uses them as a
provisional framework for the analysis of contemporary art, and raises questions
about them that are kept in suspension. Both narratives have three themes in
common: power, idealism and ambiguity. In the first, the themes are positively
aligned, since both idealism and ambiguity service the demands of capitalist
power. In the second, where the alliance between patriarchal, capitalist power and
idealism is under attack by feminists, ambiguity is foregrounded. This ambiguity
renders uncertain the status of feminist art production as a counternarrative and
it risks pushing the art towards either morbidity or utopian fantasy. Rather than
always figuring them as narratives in binary opposition to one another, therefore,
I propose a more productive reading of these two histories that does not run the
risk of constructing feminism as a failed metanarrative in relation to the victorious
metanarrative of capitalist marketing. Instead, I suggest that the dialectical
tensions between these parallel and intersecting discourses on the ideal female
body have in the 1980s and 1990s produced results that in the 1960s and 1970s
were unpredictable, including even some benefits for female consumers from the
democratisation of sexuality in fashion and pornography.
My principal concern however is to stress that, over the past thirty years or
so, feminism has played a positive role in cultural production, which post-
structuralist relativism, with its anti-idealism and foregrounding of rupture and
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discontinuity, has in the 1980s and early 1990s sometimes tended to obscure.
When feminist art production is seen as not only reactive but also as a positive
process in formation then it becomes clear that the art has proceeded in this way
according to a feminist ideal for the female body – not a representational ideal,
to replace the Venus de Milo or Madonna, but a conceptual ideal, based on a
principle of inclusiveness, of an erotically appealing female body. It becomes
clear, too, that this was not an intentional ideal in the sense that an artist or a
group necessarily and consciously intended it. It was an ideal that emerged in
relation to feminism as part of the processes and conditions of art production.
If it could be acknowledged that most contemporary art by women has devel-
oped along these lines, then feminists might be in a better position to assess
ethical questions, and what was being sacrificed or refused in the deliberate ambi-
guity and undecidability of so-called postfeminist art in the late 1990s.
While focusing on the female body in art, this book considers the way in
which visual art produced by women was informed by feminism. It is based
on the view that contemporary feminism is a coalition of various conflicting
feminisms that are neither co-extensive nor independent, but which act collec-
tively to inform contemporary art practices. While a similar case could be made
for the processes that have led to the democratisation of sexuality in pornog-
raphy and fashion marketing, the current book does not develop this point of
view. It acknowledges, however, that the inevitable ambiguities and disconti-
nuities which are entailed in this process of feminist information complicate
questions of chronology and intention, and that art is always ambiguous, never
one thing or another. As representation, art stands between artist and spectator,
subject and object, form and matter, concept and thing. As text it hovers at
the borders of categories, and as simulacrum it is subsumed in a field of images
that bear no relation to ‘reality’. If viewed in psychological terms, it is a point
of mediation between the self and an ‘other’. In bodily and social terms, it is
a prosthetic, an extension of the body and a point of intercession between one
living body and another, and therefore a mediator in sexual relations. In this
last sense, art is also always erotic, especially in the form of the naked female
body: hence the book’s title, Erotic Ambiguities .
Ambiguity in art, and the way artists and feminist critics negotiate ambi-
guity in their cultural practices is a principal theme in this book. Accordingly,
the first four chapters explore ways in which ambiguity has complicated feminist
art criticism over the past twenty to thirty years.
Chapter 1, entitled ‘Feminism, Ambiguity and the Ideal’, is introductory in
that it foreshadows the argument and structure of the book, and describes
some of the theories referred to therein. It outlines art historical literature on
idealism and the female nude in art, various historical, psychoanalytic and philo-
sophical explanations for the erotic ambiguity of visual representations of the
female body, and the implications of ambiguity for feminist politics.
Chapter 2, entitled ‘Re-visioning the Female Nude’, reviews the 1980s ‘sex
wars’ about pornography and ‘images of women’, the pleasure versus danger
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controversy amongst feminists, and the effect of these debates on the visual
arts. Against this background, it posits the critical re-visioning of the female
nude in art by women artists, as a paradigmatic application of the feminist
ideal that informs contemporary art production. Using four examples, it shows
how this process of re-visioning the ideal female body entailed, not only the
deconstruction of the Classical ideal, and therefore the foregrounding of ambi-
guity, but also an implicit proposal for a new, inclusive conceptual ideal of an
erotically appealing body.
Chapter 3, entitled ‘Historical Ambiguity’, considers the implications of
historicism, demonstrating how deconstructive criticism is useful for focusing
on ambiguity to expose how traditional images of the female nude were framed
historically in ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’ terms, but that in so doing it foregrounds
ambiguity as negative.
Chapter 4, entitled ‘Seeing Ambiguity’, shows how this devaluation of ambi-
guity was accompanied by a distrust of the sense of sight, which Martin Jay
has called the antiocularcentrism of French thought. It cites various theories
about the ambiguity of visual art – most of which, but not all, posit a link
between language and vision – as a prelude to reviewing the related, anti-visual
arguments of deconstructive feminists against 1970s vaginal imagery and body
art. It shows that these arguments are not always convincing, especially in the
light of the democratisation, or feminisation, of sexuality in body images in
advertising over the past twenty years. Analysing some contemporary, feminist
1990s art that questions, defies or refuses the antiocularcentric feminist theory
of the 1980s, this chapter concludes that, in these instances, ambiguity in visual
art is oriented towards a positive conception of the female body.
The second half of the book continues the theme of ambiguity, but concen-
trates more on the ways it was navigated in particular visual modes and artistic
practices from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Gender
Ambiguity’, registers a shift from deconstructive techniques of early 1980s
gender feminism to Judith Butler’s feminist critique of gender identity as a
category and an ideal. It analyses art and criticism that engages with issues that
Butler raised, as well as aspects of queer theory and notions of gender ambi-
guity, and it considers favourably a recommendation for the adoption of ‘the
performative approach’ to the analysis of the way gender and race are enacted.
At the same time, it points out that the processes by which ‘performativity’ is
represented, or presented as art, are often orientated towards a feminist ideal.
Chapter 6, entitled ‘Making a Difference with Ambiguity’, demonstrates that,
while queer theory critiques identity, political art that argues for difference on
the basis of identitarian claims cannot be refused. Such art does not deny ambi-
guity, but negotiates and often exploits it, and while feminism is sometimes
tangential to these negotiations, it is nevertheless implicated in them in such
a way as to orient ambiguity towards a positive conception of the female body.
The next two chapters consider various visual modes and contexts in which
artists have negotiated ambiguity productively in relation to feminist concerns.
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