The Body as Speculum: (Re)viewing Contemporary Figurative Art

by Margaret Mayhew

The previous century produced an explosion in theory as much as in art movements, and these have facilitated increasing numbers and types of artists to be viewed and included in exhibitions and literature at many levels. The most salient area of challenge has been in the involvement of women. Not only are there increasing numbers of high profile female artists, but the status and nature of how women are represented as subjects in art has been successfully challenged by progressive and feminist theoreticians as well as by feminist (inspired) artists.

In the 1970s, art theory was at the forefront of the remarkable changes in the status of the female nude, and the possibilities for figurative art which occurred in the visual arts, and yet I feel that contemporary art theory completely ignores the enormous and dynamic area of manual based figurative image making. By this I mean drawing, painting, sculpture, potting, print making or any combination of the above.

It appears that all progressive art theory, from the past twenty years, discusses either; ‘traditional fine arts’ from the nineteenth century and before; or contemporary consumer culture, (mass media, blockbuster films, advertising) or works included in the rubric of ‘contemporary art’. These consist of photography, digitally generated images, performance art, time based art, some ‘expanded field’ sculpture and installation, or in the case of Hal Foster, minimalism.

A recent and highly comprehensive text on feminist discourses in the visual arts obliquely qualified its selectivity by referring, in its introduction to “regressive artistic modes, particularly painting” (1). An older text articulated the ongoing problematic relationship of life drawing classes and a feminist critique of the European art tradition (2), but failed to mention any contemporary female artists who weren’t working either in Photography, Installation or Performance.

The same author in her preface expressed astonishment that the seminal Kenneth Clark text “The Nude” still occupied a significant and largely unchallenged position in the history and theory of figurative art.(3) A decade later, while I shudder to think of anyone reading Clark without at least a wry smile (if not tantamount disgust), to a certain extent, I can see why people still would. Apart from shooting a few deconstructive barbs at the grand old fossils of neoclassical aesthetic elitism, the progressive, postmodern and feminist theorists of the past thirty years have left the territory of classical aesthetics untouched.

In mounting a theoretical challenge to traditional aesthetics contemporary art criticism has either focussed on the contradictions in the social conditions under which aesthetics has been derived (such as Berger) or mounted a historical survey challenging the gender exclusivity in the canon of historical masters. Other writers have pursued a philosophical attack on the Platonic and/or Kantian foundations of classical aesthetics. There are an enormous plethora of post modern writers who, inspired by Bourdieu and bolstered by the Baudrillardian battle cry “Nothing Exists; It’s all simulacra!” focus their attention on the discourses of cultural studies, which include mass media, pornography and advertising, plus the emerging electronic cultures.

However, all of these theoretical strands share a common habit of completely ignoring painting, drawing and sculpture, except as historical oddities. One possible explanation for this came from Peter Fuller. In his critique of John Berger, Fuller spoke of a theoretical tendency to collapse all images into the same signifying roles, and I feel this is a failure common to most contemporary art theorists.

The strongest argument in favour of contemporary (post)modernist art theory is in its comprehensivenes. When actually discussing images, contemporary theorists often use structural semiotics in analysing the social psychological codes imbedded in various images, and provides a potent means for articulating why images affect us the way they do.

Fuller tried to elucidate a difference in the conditions of production of an art object, and how its conditions of dissemination and viewing as an object as well as an image determined its status in the complex series of codes which determine interpretation of art and images in general. In his later writings, Fuller tried to provoke a critical engagement with the materiality of artistic images as manually generated physical objects, and I feel this approaches what could be a type of progressive aesthetics. Some other artists and writers have also made tentative inroads, bridging a type of socially aware contemporary critical theory with an appreciation of the physicality of artworks as object/images.

Mira Schor is a US based painter and theoretician who has proposed an unashamedly scopophilic basis to contemporary aesthetics, in direct opposition to the anti-ocularcentric preferences of feminist theoreticians such as Luce Irigaray. While acknowledging the repulsive limitations of the patriarchal centred gaze, Schor seductively alludes to the intensely physical sensuousness of artistic media such as paint, and how painted surfaces celebrate and expand the possibilities of visual pleasure, in manners not incompatible with, and in fact, easily recuperable by feminist projects.(4)

I am also tempted to agree with Schor’s accusations levelled at the mostly male contemporary art establishment in the USA, where she accuses curators and reviewers of a type of ‘tactile defensiveness’ against the fluid potencies of paint, particularly when wielded by women. Schor traces this to a type of historical symbolism, where unruly, natural, chthonian elements are associated with women, but are expected to be managed and ruled by masculine reason. (5) Although I find her dualistic essentialism slightly awkward, I admire the possibilities for scrutinising the continuing biases of art theorists, especially where they negate a facet of cultural experience in which I am immersed.

Schor’s aesthetics, are not merely a neo romanticist hankering after an obsolete mode of communication but express a strong relationship to contemporary discourses in corporeal semiotics and phenomenologies. Merleau Ponty’s ideas on the body as encompassing forms of knowledge have shaped a considerable body of work by contemporary philosophers such as Alphonso Lingis, and they are equally applicable to a contemporary aesthetics of the art object.

“The lived physical experience, of a body, is not only as a passive recipient of external information, but a means of shaping our perception and interpretation of the world.” (6) In spite of the proliferation of data shadows and abstracted notions of the self in electronic culture, the physical body is still a significant arbiter of existence, and a visual art form which engages with this can act as an effective counter narrative to the virtual body prescribed by mass culture.

Perhaps this is why plastic arts have recently flourished, especially among female artists, despite the relative lack of attention by theorists. Current examples range from the dynamic and sensuous paintings of Wendy Sharpe, to the refined and moving eloquence of the printmaker Viv Littlejohn’s self portrait, to the texta nudes by Arlene Texta Queen, which successfully negotiate the boundaries of drawing, portraiture, pop art and performance.

Post-modern art theory is a discourse that ignores and excludes practising studio based artists, and has become increasingly self reflective (critics criticising theory) and exclusive in its term of reference and language. The increasing confinement of critical theory to universities (noticed the disappearance of lengthy newspaper art reviews?), has meant that this elegant critique of totalising discourses has itself become a totalising mantra of catch phrases hermetically sealed in hermeneutics.

The type of female figurative artists promoted by post-modern theorists as contemporary, and worthy of discussion, makes me increasingly suspicious of any declared feminist project within the theoretical academy. Contemporary figurative artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Marlene Dumas are overlooked in texts discussing the surgical mutilation antics of Orlan or the sterile simulated dismemberment of Cindy Sherman. Any facade of ‘ironic detatchment’ quickly wears thin while sickening displays of female corporeal mutilation have become almost clichéd in any hip and trendy art establishment.

The morbid obsession of art theory with analysing what can be easily read as fairly narcissistic and shallow imitative behaviours begs for some psychological analysis of the reviewers themselves. I find this type of art boring, and even more alienating than mainstream mass media.

The limitation of performance art is that the artist subsumes herself entirely within her subject. While I don’t wish to deny the eloquent and articulate reasons behind the plastic surgery enactments of Orlan, and I appreciate the economy of performance in transmitting a set of ideas, propositions or challenges, intensely and clearly; I also like to imagine that contemporary artists might have more than one note to sing.

The advantage of an art object is that it operates as a prosthetic of the self, an extension and replica of the physical body, and yet with subtleties of meaning that allow for a complex and dynamic set of interpretations. Maybe it is the risk involved in such ambiguities that detracts contemporary theoreticians from claiming art objects as their own.

At its best, manually based figurative art has the capacity to exist as an artefact of the physical gestures of an artist. In this way a good painting reads like a dance. Rhythms hum across the page or canvas, punctuated by arabesques of sweeping lines. In figurative drawing the gestures of the artist usually mimic those of the life size model posing before them. Beyond the expertise of anatomical study, a good life drawing is able to convey the unspoken complexities of the relationship between the artist and model in a way that is evocative, not only of patriarchal conventions of the gaze, but the endless and anarchic possibilities of the imagination.

While there exists so much writing on art consisting of poorly translated unintelligible garble, or pompous intellectual posturing, it is easy to forget the enormous potency and comfort of slow illuminating words, which plant themselves inside our dreams, and grow to transform our vision of the world into something that can be challenged and remade, rather than merely endured.

I not only believe that art criticism can be far more than a sophisticated advertising copy to sell artworks to consumers and curators; I depend on a narrative of intelligible, sincere and lucid writing about art and the possibilities for visual communication, in order to make sense of my own studio practise and creative life work. I assume I am not alone!

Notes
1. Helen McDonald "Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art” 2001 Routledge, London, pg. 2.
2. Lynda Nead “The female Nude: Art Obscentiy and Sexuality” 1992 Routledge, London, pg. 55.
3. ibid, pg.2.
4. Mira Schor “Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture” 1997
Duke University Press, London, pg.154.
5. ibid, pg. 166.
6. Alphonso Lingis, "Foreign Bodies" Preface page (ix) 1995
University of California Press, Berkeley

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Margaret Mayhew has a limb in all areas of figurative art. She is a painter and occasional performance artist who supports herself as a life model, and is about to embark on a thesis in Art History and Theory. She is preparing for a solo show in March at the Alliance Francaise and has work in 'Walking the Street' (Newtown).

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