WWW.HAUSSITE.NET > SCRIPT SECTION
Title: Masculine Imperative: High Modern, Postmodern
Author: Laura Cottingham
Masculine Imperative: High Modern, Postmodern
Laura Cottingham
Postwar feminism has consistently placed equal, if often uneasy, emphasis on both the symbolic and the material. In the United States, it was an "image protest" that carried the second wave to national prominence. During subsequent decades, activists and academics have waged a continuing (though far from unilateral) critique on the representation of women as constructed according to the conventions of literature, film, psychoanalysis, pornography, advertising, television, and all other forms of cultural production. Coextensive with these investigations of ideological constructions, feminists have been working against the immediate and experiential obstacles that restrict women's autonomy, such as those contained in discriminatory employment, unequal pay, inadequate healthcare, marriage laws and conventions, rape and other forms of sexualized abuse, and the systemic exclusion of women from positions of social and govemmental influence. The question of ascertaining a causality between the ideological and the material constrictions of women's experience has inspired some of recent feminism's most significant ruptures, including the segue toward psychoanalysis that occurred in England and France in the '70s, and the arguments around pornography that emerged in the United States during the early '80s.
How the
iconographic affects and constructs lived experience is still
an open debate: the material effects of recent activism are a
bit less intangible. Social changes wrought by the Women's
Liberation, Black Power, and Gay Rights movents have affected
all areas of American life, including the production and
reception of art. Since the late '60s, political activist
demands for inclusion have inspired and often been concurrent
with an emergence of related (fine) art practices and art
practitioners: feminist art and female artist, antiracist art
and nonwhite artists, gay art and "out" gay
artists. Postmodernism, the slippery term currently in usage
to describe the present moment, could be defined as exactly
this politically engendered disruption of the (hegemonic)
discourse of traditional European aesthetics.
The calls for an adjustment to the Eurocentric paradigm have
met resistance in the art world, just as they have within
other sectors of American society. One overt form of this
resistance has been a resurgence, beginning in the early
'80s, of "masculine" assertion from a significant
number of heterosexual white male American artists. Before
addressing the new (old) exclusionary character of the work,
and how, despite its self-avowed "postmodernity,"
their work moves back to traditional and tradition-upholding
male supremacy, it is necessary to uncover some aspects of
the political bias of American High Modernism. (2) In the new
"masculinity" of the postmodernity of the '80s and
'90s, the masculine imperative of High Modernism continues
unabated. In fact, it is almost as if the controlling codes
of American social daminance that contained the '50s but
'were ' sublimated in the most successful art of the period
reemerge, this time aggressively and overtly, in the
celebrations of capitalism, male hegemony, and Eurocentrality
that arrived within the so-called postmodernity of the early
'80s.
Implicit messages about the male as normative are complicit
with High Modernisim's conterminous insistance on form over
content, on white male artists over anybody else; although
the exclusionary ramifications of High Modernism are not
expressively articulated within the doctrine because they are
so neatly assumed and subsumed by it. During its hey day in
the '50s, American Modernist art and criticism seemed, in
many respects, to overthrow convention. Its retention of some
of the Western tradition's central assumptions - i.e., the
superiority of the male - has been difficult to see, and
feminist art criticism has usually been looking elsewhere.
The revisionist efforts of feminist art history and criticism
since the seventies has largely focused on the necessary
tasks of reclaiming thc "lost" contributions of
female practitioners and theoretically exploring the
consistent and different devaluations of the female image
within the West's fine art continuum. Less attention has been
paid to the cultural production of femininity's supposed
"opposite": masculinity. Yet the construction and
maintenance of a nude identity, according to an essentialized
male-supremacist understanding of the male as normative and
dominant, has been a central symbolic component of
twentieth-century American art and of the European tradition
from within which it finds meaning.
Apologists of High Modernism unabashedly proclaimed their
purpose to maintain, through formalism and the eschewing of
content, what Clement Greenberg called "the historical
essence of civilisation." Maintenance of any kind is, by
definition, conservative: the aims of High Modernism the
conservation and uncritical valuation of European, especially
"Parisian," civilisation. The "triumph"
of American Modernism during the 50s was not an attack of the
colony on the colonizer: New York Abstract Expressionism
hoped to pick up the mantle of European civilisation, not
discard it. The recent revisionism of this period by art
historians such as Serge Guilbaut and T. J. Clark, while
astute concerning many of the defining forces that
characterized postwar America, still collaborate with the
sexism of the pre-feminist period. (3)
Reconstructing Modernism (1990), for instance, a
collection of essays edited by Guilbaut, features on its
cover a Cecil Beaton photograph from a 1951 issue of American
Vogue. The well-known image presents a thin white
woman in a black satin strapless gown trimmed with a hot-pink
bow, standing, gaze averted, in front of a huge, black and
pink Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (1951). For both
Guilbaut and Clark, the Vogue photo represents a
crisis of intention, situation, and use for Pollock and
Abstract Expressionism. In his extensive envy on Pollock
included in the same anthology, Clark considers the Vogue
photos at Iength: he is compelled to explain them, to
understand them, to interrogate them, to position them, to
deconstruct them. His chief concern is how these
"fashion photographs" represent a
"misuse" of Pollock and whether this misuse of
"art" is inevitable. "The Vogue photographs
matter," he writes, "because they bring to mind -
or stir up in us - the most depressing of all auspicious we
might have about modern art: the bad dream of modernity I
shall call it." Yet how different are my nightmares from
those of T. J. Clark! His concerns are that Pollock is
reduced to "the fashionable," or to "the
decorative." For him, the photographs are
"nightmarish" because "they speak to the hold
of capitalist culture, the way it outflanks any work against
the figurative and makes it an aspect of its own
figuration." Amazingly, Clark, while flxated on the
woman/figure positioned in the foreground of Pollock's
canvas, cannot see her. He accepts a priority it seems, that
Pollock has been "trivialized" by the Vogue
photograps without bothering to consider what allows him so
easily to define what it is that for him constitutes
"the trivial." Clark takes for granted that Vogue,
the magazine and the context within which Beaton's
photographs first appeared, is trivial. And he assumes, by
extension, that blonde women in strapless gowns are,
likewise, the very sign of the trivial. This is not at all
what I see when I look at that by-now infamous series of Vogue
photographs: I don't see the Pollock rendered decorative by
the woman, I see the woman, already decorative by her
position within male supremacy, further reinscribed as
decorative, as object by the painting. I don't moan the loss
of abstractions meaning, I cry that a modernist painting is
imbued by Clark and others, with more acrious intentionality
and purpose than they ascribe a woman-perhaps espcially a
blonde woman in a black strapeless.(4) The "crisis"
the Vogue photographs represent for some contemporary
art historians is the same crisis they must have represented
for Pollock and Greenberg: that the "art" was
rendered trivial in being rendered "feminine".
Pollock's work appeared in other magazines during the '50s
and '60s, but it's the woman's fashion magazine Vogue
that inspires/inspired alarm. Somehow, if Pollock is standing
in front of his own canvas, as he appears in numerous other
images of the period, the "art" isn't lost the way
it is, for Clark, if a "fashion model" takes the
artist's place. What is it that determines why Life
magazine and a male body are synonymous with art but Vogue
magazine and a female body put art in a "crisis"
that calls forth "the bad dream of modernism"?
II
In one of his most famous essays, Greenberg equates
practioners of formalist Modernism, who conform to an elite
and exclusionary tradition with defenders of democratic
ideals - and he designates those who criticize culture from a
subordinated position as "plebeian" and
"reactionary": "Then the plebian finds courage
for the first time to voice his opinions openly. Most often
this resentment toward culture is to be found where the
dissatisfaction with with society is reactionary
dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and
puritanism and latest of all, in fascism." (5)
Greenberg, an educated white heterosexual male at the
propellant center of (American) High Modernisms aims and
audience, could not anticipate how those marginalized by this
discourse-the "plebeian." the non-white, the
non-male-might arrive at an emancipatory, rather than a
reactionary, criticism of the avant-garde. (6) Greenberg's
"avant-garde" carried the United States and its
white male practitioners into new heights of cultural
imperialism and individuated economic and professional
success and it faithfully adhered to its program of
essentialized civilization. lt neither sought nor effected
any disruption of Euro-derived cultural hegemony, exepted
that it tilted the center toward the American side of the
Atlantic. During the '50s and '60s, those who attempted to
enter art production on from outside its heterosexual-male,
Euro-American, urban center-women, non-whites, gay men - were
either prohibited from participating or were forced to deny
difference and assimilate. In his attempt to explain how a
few gay male artists identified with Pop came to eclipse the
hetero-new Abstract Expressionists and dominate fine art
during the repressive late '50s and early '60s, Jonathan Katz
suggests that Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, because
of their "closet" tradition as gay men, were best
placed to conform to the politics of containment that defined
the height of the Cold War period, that they were already
positioned as "organizational men" who could
"work, as they had all their lives, within the terms of
the national consensus." And if gay codes and personal
homosexual experience both influenced and were even then
obvious in pop, as Katz observes, "to identify that
queer voice is of course to self-identify as well, especially
in the context of the '50s. So it's equally not surprisingly
that the gay content of this artwork rarely made it into
print.
Similarily, women artists, whose political status was not as
easily rendered opaque, still attempted to be men
"artists": like their literary precedents in the
previous century, many tried to alter the public's awareness
of their gender by creating or changing their female-coded
first names. For instance, in the '50s and early '60s, Lee
Krasner and Elaine De Kooning both chose to sign their work
with initials only, Grace Hartigan briefly adopted
"George" as her professional first name, and
Sturtevant began and continues to work under the name
"Sturtevant" only. American women artists active
during the decades between World War II and the feminist
movement of the '70s utilized a variety of strategies in
their attempts to be adopted as artists, not women-because to
be a woman was by definition not to be an artist. The
masculinist bias that informs the critical and historical
interpretation of the Pop Movement still prevails in two
recent museum exhibitions devoted to the movement, "Pop
Art:. An International Perspective" (mounted in 1991 by
The Royal of Arts, London) and "Hand Painted Pop:
American Art in Transition 1955-1962" (presented in 1993
by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). In her
catalogue essay for the Los Angeles show, co-curator Donna de
Salvo admits that artists not included in either of the two
recent major exhibitions "like Martha Edelheit, Lettie
Eisenhower, Roslyn Drexler, Niki de Saint-Phalle, and
Marjorie Strider have been omitted from most studies of the
period." (8) other active (female) participants
simgularly excluded include Lee Bontecou, Carallce
Schneemann, and Sturtevant. Women artists not anly face
different, and more emphatic, career obstacles than their
male counterparts, they are also much mare likely to be
written out of history, even when they have (supposedly)
succeseeded. But this continued erasure cannot be considered
surprising given the blatant sexism which informs art's
reception. Writing about the '70s, Lucy Lippard noted:
"When somebody said 'You paint like a man,' you were
supposed to be happy, and you were happy, because you knew
you were at least making neutral art instead of feminine art
- god forbid." (9)
The phrase "neutral art" expresses the requisites,
and the myth, of High Modernism, which calls for an art that
is hermeticaly sealed, an art separated from social and
political circumstance and devoted only to itself, its
"neutrality." of course, the "neutral"
art first championed by Greenberg, New York Abstract
Expressionism, was not and is not "neutral." Like
the conceptualized "objectivity" in Continental
philosophy and science upon which it is based, High Modemism
is not' neutral": it is nationalized, racialized, and
gendered. Whatever the importance of abstract art to
shattering fine art's preoccupation with ism, whatever its
"beauty," whatever its other intentions or affects,
formalism's genesis and the continuation of its tradition
cannot be separated from its celebration of nationalism and
its sociopolitical formation as a white male American
"triumph." (10)
The "value" that has been attributed to and
continues to be accrued to American abstraction cannot be
considered as in any way distinct from those cultural values
most cherished during the historical period that permitted
the movement's "triumph." Even to consider the art
objects, the paintings, as distinct, isolatable cultural
phenomena is entirely specious: the cultural evaluation of
art is always too overdetemined by the categorical directives
imposed by the site of its production and the social position
of its producer. Jackson Pollock's paintings, for instance,
cannot be considered distinct from those attributes Pollock,
the straight white man, possessed that allowed for Greenberg
to proclaim him "the greatest American painter of the
20th century," and for others to concur and (continue
to) sustain that assessment. As Pollock's friend Bill Hopkins
remarks in a biography of the artist, "He was the great
American painter. lf you conceive of such a person, first of
all, he has to be a real American, not a transplanted
European. And he should have the American virtues-he should
be rough-and-humble American tacitum - if he is a cowboy, so
much the better." (11)
Not that it has changed in the profile of the American
artist: with few exceptions. In contemporary New York art, a
revenge against the "political disruption of straight
white male centrality is visible in the work of numerous
man-boy artists. A visible, or iconographic, as written of
masculinity was not a necessary feature of it because the
prerogatives of straight white maleness were contained within
High Modernism's "objectivity," and the legal,
educational, and social apparatus of the United States
effetively discourged the entrance, and prohibited the
success, of anyone else.
Beginning in the seventies and into the eighties, art that
visibly critiqued High Modernism and asserted social
difference began to emerge from practitioners outside the
historically valuated class. Although this was of course not
the first time women, nonwhites, or homosexuals "made
art," it was during this decade that a widespread
embrace of value contained in critiques of Eurocentrism, male
supremacy, and compulsory heterosexuality began to take hold
within art criticism and some museum institutions.
By the early 1980s, for the first time in Euro-American
history, heterosexual white men could not expect to have
complete control of all resources. Coming after a few
thousand years of nearly absolute rights to property,
education, money, jobs, prestige, government control, and
cultural production as defined within and institutions by the
laws and customs of the European tradition, the material
effects of the black power, women's liberation, and gay
rights movements caused psychic anxiety among those who had
previously enjoyed nearly absolute privilege: straight white
men. The art community in the United States was not just
tangentially affected by the activist movements that slowly
emerged out of the '50s and to become dominant forces from
the mid-'60s into the late '70s. Although the civil rights
and Black Power movements, the anti-Vietnam War campaigns,
and the emergence of Gay Rights efforts have continued to
influence American art since the '70s, the Women's Liberation
Movement had the most immediate impact because, the other
political mobilizations, it spawned an immediate visual arts
movement. As an eruption against the prevailing aesthetics of
Late Mode as contained in Modernism, the Feminist Art
Movement introduced radical anti-Modernist concepts such as
the refusal of formalism, championing of content, embracement
of autobiography, denial of the fine art hierarchy, and,
perhaps the most radical of all, the acknowledgment of female
experience as a viable subject for art. The pervasive impact
of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States, which
included thousands of participants, hundreds of
organizations, dozens of publications, and at Ieast two
now-defunct educational institutions, has yet to be formally
acknowledged by either the academic or museum apparatus (both
a written history and a survey exhibition are awaited). But
the Movement's effect is apparent in artists as Barbara
Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman, who are indebted to
both the ideological and the structural changes forged by the
Feminist Art Movement during the '70s. The legacy of the
Movement continues on in the work of younger (women) artists,
such as Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, and Sue Williams. But it
also informs the production of numerous other contemperary
artists, not because they are working within an appreciation
of the insights of form, but because they are working against
them.
III
Epitheted by one London critic as "America's bad boy
artist," Jeff Koons was one of the divergent group of
"bad boys" who emerged onto the American art scene
of the 1980s. "Bad Boys" no longer were abstract
expressionists painters (Ross Bleckner and Caroll Dunham, for
instance, are "good boys"), but always an
intellectual and favor an "in your face" aesthetic
similar to that employed by the boy in a Norman Rockwell
painting who mischievously pushes a frog under a girl's nose.
Hence the faux-dangerous term "bad boy". Probably
the most commercially succesful of the New York artists of
the '80s, Koons's first exhibited works included inflatable
plastic flowers, vacuum cleaners sealed in plexiglass boxes,
and appropriated advertisements. The most internally
consistent and interesting aspect of his work has been its
attempt to assault and subvert High Modernist
"taste." Koons has routinely taken objects of
mundane utility, such as vacuum cleaners and basketballs, and
items of Greenbergian "kitsch," such as plastic
bunnies and cheap roadside souvenirs, and successfully sold
them into the fine art continuum - although the ostensible
joke on capitalism, on commodity fetishism, is itself a joke:
the art's experience as a stockbroker success - fully
informed his marketing stratgies. Though packaged and sold as
the product of a "rebel," Koons's work does nothing
to disrupt the dominant aesthetics of straight white nude
centrality. In fact, it reinscribes it.
In the Iate
1980s, Koons shifted his interest in hypercommodification
away from exclusively inanimate objects. A 1988 sculpture of
two Caucasian children, naked, marked a turn that would
inspire the artist's production for the next five years.
Koons has described Naked as follows: "The young boy and
young girl are like Adam and Eve, overly standing on a heart
that's flowered."(6) The piece was first exhibited with
twenty kitsch-inspired sculptures, including others with
Biblical references such as serpents and John the Baptist
Naked calls forth the Judian determination for female
subjugation made cohesive in the Adam and Eve myth. In
Genesis, the male preexists the female, and, in fact, the
female is a parasite, created from the male rib. Genesis is
also the primary Western text to establish the female as
evil: Eve is the original heretic, liar, and sinner, and
because of her disobedience all of her female deserve and
will receive punishment. After Eve eats a piece of
(forbidden) fruit, "God said to the woman, 'You shall
bear children in intense pain and suffering; yet even so, you
shall welcome your husband's affections, and he shall be your
master' " (Genesis 3:16). Genesis assigns womnn/women
responsibility for her oppression, designates her as
heterosexual, dictates reproductive intercourse as normative
sex, and names man as woman's rightful master. Koons's Naked,
as a "faithful" illustration of Judaism and
Christianity, depicts two Caucasian children genitally naked
as male and female, as inscriptions of whiteness and
heterosexuality. Me "sentimentality," of which
Koons is conscious, is a fantasy of innocence romanticized
according to the mythic prerequisites of Europatriarchy.
Few narratives in Western history carry either the misogyny
or the historical influence of the old Testament's first
book. Koons evidently flirted with the story of Adam and Eve:
much of his work since 1988, which frequently uses the nude
body of his wife, Ilona Staller, maps that narrative. And
perhaps the artist's desire to "return to the Garden of
Eden" is a trip of less historical distance than the
site of his intent at first glance suggests. Perhaps, for
Koons and other straight white American men, "the Garden
of Eden" is the 1950s, when, like the biblical Adam,
they reigned supreme.
In 1988-89, Koons exhibited a series of self-advertisements
in four art magazines. In the flrst, published in Flash
Art, his head is between two pigs. The word
"pig" holds a specific place in American slang: as
a derogatory term for a member of the police force and/or for
a bigoted person, as in "male Chauvinist pig." To
all critiques Koons has explained: "I wanted to debase
myself, and became myself a pig, before the viewer."
(14) In the Arts ad Koons clad in a crested robe
before and flanked by two women; unlike the pigs in the
earlier image, the women are visual subordinates, not equals.
Centrally positioned in a frame, Koons is constructed as the
"master," perhaps the king, of a tropical paradise;
there are stand-ins for (black) slaves. In the Artforum ad,
Koons assumes another power position, that of a ruler. He
appears before a class of white schoolchildren in front of a
blackboard that shows a Greenberg-like mock aphorism:
"Exploit the Masses/Banality as Saviour." (15) In a
fourth Koons ad, paid for in Art, women are added to
animals and children as another class subjuncted to Koons.
Koons is dressed in artist black and two women are
(un)dressed in black, one woman is seated, her legs open, on
the ground, her left hand holding the open mouth of a
miniature horse whose head is located in front of Koons's
crotch. A blond woman is offering Koons a cake. This fantasy
is set, like many of Koons's works, in an outdoor,
"natural" setting, his "Garden of Eden,"
that my" site where God made man master over women.
Koons further perpetuates Euro-Christian mythology in
rendering -"the original human" white.
In 1990, Koons began exhibiting photography-based paintings
and various sculptural forms of himself and his wife engaged
in sexual activities. lt has been suggested, albeit
unconvincingly, that pornography is simply an addition to
Koons's repertoire of hypertrophied kitsch. For instance,
Carter Ratcliff states ihat Koons asserts "the dreariest
generalities of banal taste and pomographic sexuality,
including ihe cliche of the insatiable child with hairless
pudenda." (16) This completely denies the function the
conventions of pornography play to maintain a sexualized
class system: the ideological components activated, for
instance, by "the insatiable child-woman with hairless
pudenda " normal sex violence: of children, by
mystifying and misinterpreting their powerlessness as
comdousness ("Lolita"), of women, by displacing
male violence onto desire (she is "insatiable").
The pornographic paintings and sculptures Koons exhibited at
the Venice Aperto in 1990 and at Sonnabend Gallery in 1991
are reinscribing the narrative of straight white male
valuation, basrd as they are on the "original" text
of female subordination. Koons has repeatedly stated that
"IIona and I are the contemporary Adam and Eve."
Interestingly, Koons situates himself as Adam when Adam was
still in God's favor, while Staller is visually constructed
as a "fallen" Eve.
Sometime in 1989, Koons announced his plan to make a film, Made
in Heaven. that would feature himself
fucking/raping/plugging/ploughing - whatever verbs are upheld
by the contemporary use of the term "pornography"
by a heterosexual male - his wife. The title of the film, and
Koons's comments about it, like Naked, within a
symbolic space of Adam and Eve. While declaring himself
"Adam" and his wife "Eve", the film's
title also suggests that we accept Koons as "God,"
just as advertisements suggest we accept him as
"king" and "teacher" even if we know he
is a "pig." one can also assume that Koons is
speaking for himself, within his (dominant) position as a
straight white: "There are no barriers at all in the
world, and this is one of the things that the film is
communicating." Whose world? is the question he
chooses to skip. It is it not possibte to interpret Koons's
need to aresponse to the threat posed by non-straight-white
males to his historically previous centrality?
At 1990 Venice Bienale, where Koons was included in the
Aperto, he was using Staller as his prop, in upstaging the
(woman, chosen for the more prestigious American Pavilion. As
Vogue noted, "At the Bienale where Jenny Holzer
represented the United States and won the prize for 'best
pavilion,' the work was all about Koons."l" who is
doing all the talking? Koons could, and in many ways did,
upstage the first woman to be chosen to represent the United
States in Venice, is an instance of how art produced by a
rnan is considered more valuable than that made by a woman,
by virtue of the cultural assumption that men are more
valuable than women. Of course, the valuation of art has been
and continues to be detemined as much by who product it as by
what that art might be. Even prestigious awards, such as the
Venice prize, when bestowed upon them, but rather lower the
"value" of the award (until another white male
receives it).
lf Koons were the only artist involved in reactivating an art
of white male domination, it might be possible to isolate his
individuated psyche needs from those of a more general
cultural apparatus. But he isn't. Since the mid-'80s, during
the period when a number of American women artists began to
adopt the institutional laurels of "superstar"
status, there has been a backlash of visibly misogynist art
produced in New York, and rewarded by the most prestigious
collectors, galleries, and museums, a backlash against female
and the women's art movement of the mid-'70s was already in
place by the beginning of the eighties, when
Neo-Expressionism dominatod New York's critical and financial
markets with artists such as Eric Fischl and David Salle, who
revived the 19th-century tradition of objectifying the female
nude, and Julian Schnabel and Ross Bleckner, who reintroduced
the gestural grandiosity of Expressionism. But the most
consistent perpetrator during the Eighties was art produced
by Richard Prince.
Like Koons, Prince began his New York career in the early
-'80s with exhibitions of advertisements and other
"rephotographed" images from magazines. In 1988 he
began to exhibit paintings for the first time. The large
monochrome canvases, as Gary Indiana noted then, "index
the high spiritual ambitions of Abstract Expressionism - what
might be called America's aesthetic establishment,"(18)
and, what might be called America's late-great all-male art
club. The first "Joke" paintings included text;
later they would include cartoon imagery, mostly drawn from
the '50s, the American male modernist's "Garden of
Eden," when men were men and women were their
subordinates and American Abstract Expressionism reigned
supreme. The textual elements in the joke paintings, which
Prince is still producing, include varied referents, such as
talking animals, the Vietnam War, salesmen, and
psychologists. But the most persistent theme running through
the series is sexism: the completion of Prince's
"jokes" depend on the viewer's agrement, and
sympathy, with social/sexual order constructed in the text.
Four typical paintings from Prince's "joke" series,
exhibited at the "Metropolis" exhibition in Berlin
in 1991, reproduce a narrative of white male domination and
female subordination. The silkscreen canvas, series inrcludes
a line drawing of a domestic interior juxtaposed with images
of a white male boxer(s). The white male athlete, cropped
variously, is gloved, in the ring, fighting. His struggle, to
the visual and verbal syntax of these canvases, is with the
home and "the female", although he could also be
fighting to "get back in the ring," to be that
white hope." American boxing, originally an all-white
male sport, then a racially segregated all-male sport, has
been successfully dominated by black men since 1959, when the
U.S. Supreme Court declared the sport's racial ban
unconstitutional.
In Good Revolution (1991), Prince's white male boxer
heroically dominates the canvas: he is centrally positioned
and takes up most of the space. The "home"
interior, including two beds and a bit of kitchen, occupies a
small area. lt is, in fact, "behind" the boxer,
which has been on top of it. The text reads, "Do you
know what it means to come home at night to a woman who give
you a little love, a little affection, a little tendemess? lt
means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means."
The text, which Prince has used often before, the title, Good
Revolution, and the boxer's visual domination of the
"home," suggest a reassertion of male prerogative.
lt inscribes the place of woman as "the home," and
her occupation within it to "give," and asserts
that women's labor should continue to be, as it has been
throughout most of history, unpaid, for free, a (legally and
socially enforced) "gift." The boxer's domination
of the home is constructed as a response to the male anger
articulated in the text: the "revolution" of the
title is a hope, fantasized in the visual iconography, that
men will "reclaim" their power over women. lt is
also a hope whose reason rests on a sociological delusion:
men still dominate women, in the home as elsewhere, just as
white men still dominate black men, even if black men now
dominate boxing.
In Sampling the Chocolate (1991), the visual
construction is similar: three variously cropped white male
boxer images are juxtaposed over line drawings of an interior
and a cityscape. The text across the bottom reads: A man
walked into a doctor's office to get a check-up. After the
examination the doctor says to the man, I've got good news
and I've got bad news. The bad news is you're going to die in
a year and there's nothing you can do about it. The good news
is I'm having an affair with my secretary." Here the
"joke" may seem to be the disjunction between the
doctor's news, that the "good" news is of no
relevance to the "dying" man. Yet from a male
supremacist position, the disjunctive element is rendered
continuous: while one man is going to die ("bad"
for the male power class), another, living, is maintaining
male power through the economic and sexual subordination.
In Why Did the Nazi Cross the Road? (1991), the home
sketches occupy most of the space and the boxer is positioned
walking off the right of the canvas. The text reads, "A
man was on safari with his native guide when they came upon a
beautiful blonde bathing naked in the stream. 'My god, who's
that?' the man asked. 'Daughter of missionary, bwana,' was
the reply. 'l haven't seen a white woman in so long,' the man
sighed, 'that I'd give anything to eat her.' So the guide
raised his rifle to his shoulder and shot her." The
racist implications here are obvious: the woman is shot
because the "native" is a cannibal, and the
cannibal assumes the white man means "to eat"
literaly. And perhaps the woman must be killed because the
white's man's desire "to eat her" doesn't conform
to patriarchy's system of female sexual subordination, which
requires the man to fuck/rape her, to subordinate through
sexual violence and for the resultant childbearing.
Of course Prince probably claims he doesn't mean what he
says: one consistent feature of post-1980 New York bad
boy/white boy art is that it attempts to situate itself as
irony and even "critique." one begins to wonder,
though, why commercially and critically successful American
art employs so much irony and so little critique." Koons
and Prince, for instance, have usually been permitted to read
as "mirrors" (rather than inscribers) of dominant
and reactionary cultural vatues, especially that of male
supremacy. But mirroring is, of course, a reproductive
strategy. Though Prince's work, like Koons's, may assault
standards of "gentility," neither artist ever
assaults the basic power prerequisites that determine meaning
in contemporary American society: money, class, masculinity,
and a Euro-derived ethnicity. In fact, quite the opposite.
Koons and Prince, while engaged with a mass culture visual
play similar to that first offered in the Pop Art of the late
'50s and early '60s, remain faithful adherents to
conservative mass culture values-especially the
"value" of maleness.
An assertion of male superiority is of limited use value
unless it also establishes whom the male is superior to
(i.e., the female): must visual inscriptions of maleness
include, as Koons's and Prince's do, the denigration of the
female. The works of Pruitt-Early also feature objectified
female nudes and utilize the pornographic, as Koons does, to
reinscribe the male prerogative of female sexual
availability. In the scribbled narratives of Sean Landers,
female sexual availability is often equated with art world
success. His texts, on yellow legal paper and exhibited at
eye level at PostMasters and Andrea Rosen in 1991 and 1992,
put forth a male narrator whose self-pity derives from the
injustices he perceives to be perpetrated on him by the
refusal of galleries to show him, and the refusal of women to
be fucked by him. In Landers's narratives his art and his
Penis consistently meet the same fates, they collapse
into/are the same thing.
Within the practice of artist Matthew Barney this
construction of "the male" as a sign of value
reaches dizzying heights. lt is no coincidence that Barney's
first New York solo show, which was preestablished to
proclaim him as an art star, appeared in the autumn of 1991,
during the height of economic anxiety within the New York art
community. The sense of despair and of impending catastrophe
was so high that the summer months had been dominatod by a
unquenchable rumor that the Mary Boone Gallery was going
bankrupt.
Matthew Barney was presented, and accepted, as the
"great white hope." Under twenty-five, straight,
white, male, and a fashion model with a Yale BFA, Barney was
in the autumn of 1991 for Barbara Gladstone and conservative
critics what Pollock was in the postwar period for Betty
Parsons and Clement Greenberg- America's art opportunity. of
course, the stakes were considerably different: whereas in
the '50s the U.S.A. had to prove itself capable of leading
fine art, in the early '90s the U.S.A. had to prove itself
capable of holding en to the lead. What was most compelling
about the Barney ascension was how predictable it was. (21)
In desperation, the art community attempted to resurrect the
past: the straight white man as savior. Straightness and
whiteness were nocesug to the marketing, but the most crucial
aspect to Barney, the foundation of his work, was and is its
insistence en masculinity as the determinant of value.
Barney's 1991 show at Barbara Gladstone, his earlier works at
Yale University at Stuart Regan in Los Angeles, and his
subsequent installations in San Francisco, at Documenta 9,
all revolve around a formulation of maleness constructed by
(male) athletics.(22) Unlike other male purveyors of debased
female iconography, Barney doesn't visually or verbally index
women in his work. Like professional American football,
Barney eliminates the female before the game even gets
started-or perhaps Barney is Adam before God created Eve from
his rib. Although within Barney's work man does, like Adam,
create woman: The only female images are those of men in
women's clothes, that is, men creating (themselves as) women.
His work consistently shows various forms of male-coded
biological- like materials, such as wax that looks like cum,
and tapioca that resembles sperm. These oozy materials
collaborate to form various sports-resemblant devices, such
as bench presses and shoulder pads. It suggests that the body
of man produces, biologically and therefore inevitably,
athletic prowess, and this characteristic is, within an art
context, the production of value itself.
Barney's videos, which document the artist's adventures with
his objects and are considered by many to be his
"real" work, are enactments of a male identity
continually reconstructed aspects. Barney is not gay, and
anybody can "see" he's not a woman. The sculptural
assert a masculinity, and unlike the videos, they are fixed
stable - and for sale! Whatever fluctuations of sexual
identity occur in the video, in the locker-room maleness of
the sculptures, sexual difference asserts itself as male
domination. Based on biological understandings of maleness,
Barney's sports objects, like Prince's Boxer, index and
celebrate the only remaining a - male arena in U.S. amicty:
Professional sport. in doing so, Barney's work goes back to
the moment, still within memory, when fine art was as rnale
exclusive as the Oakland Raiders, when women were cast as
cheerleaders and only men were allowed to play the field.
The regressive fantasies of male exclusivity activated in the
work of Koons, Prince, Barney, and their less famous fellow
travelers on the road to that last big football game in the
sky coexist with contemporaries who are actively pursuing an
art that doesn't rely on the reification of traditionally
historicized power one of the most potentially emancipatory
features of some recent American art is its continued
struggle to wrestle meaning out from under the formalist
entrenchment proscribed under High Modernism. Not satistied
by the possibilities of a merely descriptive or
sociologically based practice, the most radical artistic
investigations utilize a strategy that relies on the pretense
of neutrality. Artists engaged with this type of production
work with various visual strategies and according to
different ethical and political priorities. That have
produced such a wide range of activity, including the work of
Adrian Piper, Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler, Barbara Krüger,
Jenny Holzer. Renee Green, David Hammons, Felix
Gonzalez-Torres, Sue Willams, Fred Williams, Donald Mogett,
Gary Simmons, Susan Silas, Sherrie Levine, Loma Simpson, as
well as that of so many other critically engaged contemparary
artists are as simple as they are complex. They stem from a
basic premise of hope based in knowledge and the destruction
of (false) myth; excepting Haacke, who is working from an
Marxist perspective, this aesthetic criticality is embodied
in contemporary American art drawn from the hopes and demands
of the Black Power, Women's Liberation and Gay Rights
movements. But art that legitimizes the power relations of
Euro-derivative male domination has been a steady American
cultural product during the 20th century. We must continue to
interrogate who and what our society values - and why.
This essay was
first published in New Feminist Criticism, ed. by J.
Frueh, C. Langer and A. Raven (New York: Harper Collins,
1994), pp.133-151
Notes
1. To "protect the image of Miss America, an image that
oppresses women in every area in which it purports to
represent us, "demonstrators in Atlantic City in
September 1968 threw bras, girdles and copies of "women
magazines" into a trash can, according to the leaflet
No More Miss America!, reprinted in Sisterhood is
Powerful, ed. Robin morgan (New York: Random House,
1970), p.585.
2. I use "High Modernism" to refer to the
undersanding of Modernism put forth by Greenberg.
3. Sexism is a central impasse in the development of
contemperary Marxist theory. How completely traditional
Marxism, with its assumption of a (male) working class is
rendered inadequate when problematized by the "woman
question" is manifest in the glaring instability of just
one line from British Marxist Terry Eagleton's Ideology (London:
Verso, 1991). Attempting to be "sensitive" to
feminism, Eagleton introduces shifting pronouns (some
"he," sometimes "she") So that during a
on of Lukacs, Eagleton asks, "How does the worker
constitute herself as a subject on the basis of her
objectification?" (p. 103), With the use of shifting
pronouns, Eagleton attempts to degender "the
revolutionary subject"
but that is, of course, impossible, because the worker who
seeks to constitute herself as a subject is to objectified in
ways that the worker who seeks to constitiute himself as a
subject is not. That women are historically determined as
both "commodity and class", as materialist
feminists such as Christine Delphy and Catharine MacKinnon
have argued, must be made central to Marxism, if its critical
theory is to hold any emancypatory value.
4. Timothy J. Clark, "Jackson Pollock's
Abstraction," in Reconstructing Modernism, edited
by Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1990). In the
afterword to his essay, Clark admits that he has neglected
the "matter of Pollock's gender". For him this
means omissiion of the discussion of Pollock's
"drips" as a construction of "sexual
difference".
5. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch,"
first published in Partisan Review, Fall 1939;
reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism,vol.1, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University
Press, 1986), pp. 5-22. Greenberg almost certainly is
thinking here of Nietzsche's argument about the
"politics of resentment", but he too willingly
transposes the historical situation of Europe in the 1920s to
the American scene of the late 1930s.
6. Cassandra Langer has suggested that Greenberg's
positioning of himself as a critic "for exclusion"
should be considered in relationship to the social prejudice
and assimilation process American Jews endured during and
after World war II.
7. Jonathan Katz, "Culture and Subculture", paper
delivered at the College art Association Convention,
Washington, D.C., 1991. For another discussion of the context
of gayness that informs Johns, see Jonathan Weinberg,
"It's in the Can: Jasper Johns and the Anal
Society", Genders (Spring 1988) , University of
Texas Press: 41-56.
8. Donna de Salvo, "Subjects of the artists': Towards a
Painting without ideals," Handpainted Pop: American
Art in Transition 1955-62, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), p. 70.
9. Lucy R. Lippard, "What is female Imagery?" Ms.,
May 1975, reprinted in Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976), p.89.
10. The political use of High Modernism, specifically
abstraction, as a symbol of antifacism and, after World war
II, anticommunism, is documented by Serge Guilbaut in How
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
11. Budd Hopkins, as quoted in Jackson Pollock, by
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith (New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, 1989), p. 595
12. Tavia M. Fortt and Terry R. Myers call into question how
the white boy politics of the New York School continue to be
played out, not only in the ongoing legacy of "white boy
abstraction", but in the white boy basis/bias that
continues to inform all and various kinds of masculine
assertion and the essentialization of a male identity include
Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and Mike Kelley. thanks to Adrian
Piper for reminding me of these three "Bad litte
Boys", as she calls them.
13. Jeff Koons, as quoted in "Super Star", by
Andrew Renton, Blitz, January 1990, p. 55.
14. Jeff Koons, as quoted in "Jeff Koons and The Art of
the Deal", by Andrew Renton, Performance (London),
September 1990, p. 26.
15. The Artforum ad was included in Adrian piper's
photo-text collage Ur-Mutter #8, 1989, next to an
image of an impoverished black African woman holding a child.
As a contrast to koons's smug, well-fed face and his
suggestion to "exploit the mases", the words
"fight or die" appear under Piper's image,
suggesting that Piper does not interpret Koons's work with
the "irony" his supporters insist upon.
16. Carter Ratcliff, "Not for Repro", Artforum,
February 1992, pp. 82-85.
17. Dodie Kazanjian, "Koons Crazy", Vogue,
August 1990, p.338.
18. Gary Indiana, "Tell me Everything", Village
Voice, art supplement, May 3, 1988, pp. 8, 10-11.
19. One of the more interesting aspectsof the contemporary
American visual art "world" - of artists, dealers,
critics, collectors - is how many wish to be considered
participants on the emancipatory side of history, and so few
do the work necessary to be so.
20. For a discussion of the masculine construct in
Pruitt-Early and Candy Ass, see my "Negotiating
masculinity and representation", Contemporanea,
December 1990, pp. 46-51.
21. Before his first solo show in new york, Barney exhibited
in Los Angeles at the gallery of Barbara Gladstone's son,
Stuart Regan. Before the nearly identical show opened in New
York at Gladstone's gallery, Barney was featured in a
full-page review in Flash Art, in a two page rave
review in Arts and on the cover of Artforum - the
first time any artist has ever been featured on the cover of Artforum
without having had a show in New York. The Gladstone show
was then featured in a longish review in the New York
Times, written by the spouse of the reviewer who had
given the rave in Arts, which significantly, appeared during
the earlier part of the show's run (first-time solo shows, if
ever covered in the Times, are more often run just
before the show closes, and most often occupy under three
column inches; the piece on Barney's show ran over twelve).
Barbara Gladstone also represents Richard Prince.
22. The discussion of Mathew Barney is taken from my column
"Art & Thought", NYQ, November 24, 1991,
p. 41.