Lara Khatib
Najat Karame
Lena - Arine Baghdoyan
Pictures found at the end
Blurring the Boundaries Between Women and Reality
How we comprehend the world depends on how we represent it, what a person interprets as reality varies. Women have been until today an aesthetic object idealized and subjected to conventions that are socially constructed and agreed upon, hence the naturalistic element of the female is sacrificed for the idealized, the manipulation of reality as a result has become an issue for women that are trying to meet the standards set by society. The conventions that are socially constructed have been formed with regard to a male perception of what is aesthetically acceptable regarding the female’s body; these conventions lead to a set of discourses that form representations and normalize them to the public. This normalization of the discourses shaped by men created a reality that is not necessarily genuine and lead to a cultural obsession with the wrong image.
The cultural obsession with stardom and their idealized bodies has been dominating our present; the invasion of private moments and the manipulation of what is presented to the public has become an issue that Freud, Saville and Seymour try to address. What men perceive as reality in Kim Kardashian’s magazine pose is challenged by Freud, Saville, and Seymour. Why do men idealize the stardom photographs? Do they regard it as reality or are they aware of the modifications made to the photographs released to the public? Hence, what is reality for the male gaze, and what is the role of the female as an object of the cultural obsession? These artists and photographers try to address the male gaze in light of what is real, idealized, and objectified, forcing the viewers to see things differently.
What is “reality” for the male gaze is actually a cultural obsession with manipulating “Reality” and idealizing the wrong image, which is challenged by the painters and photographers.
Objects of beauty have always been described and bounded by delicate feminine traits, what is aesthetic has taken on a gendered meaning that precludes women from the experience of the sublime and allows males to take on the power of this decision. Women by being the subjects of aesthetic pleasure and attaining the passive role of being depicted in art have allowed the male to situate these objects and attain the active role of evaluating them. This gives the males a form of power over what the female image should be constituted of and leads to a subjective representation of reality dominated by the male gaze; they will represent the desired objects of that reality neglecting the flaws underlying the woman. Hence it is hard to measure representations against a reality as it takes on a subjective stance, however the subjectivity of Freud and Saville in their representation of the female body is not biased to the extent that it neglects what is seen in front of them, on the contrary, it represents exactly what is seen except in a personalized manner in order to deliver a message of awareness.
“Reality” is the female devoid of any embellishments on her body; it is the natural makeup of the body with all its flaws, perfections, and underlying emotions. However, “reality” is the female modified and manipulated so that to meet a certain standard set by culture. When speaking of Reality the unappealing bodily components are considered as part of the natural body, they should be addressed in order to challenge the male construct of reality that neglects them.
Lucian Freud’s work is best defined as hyper – realism where he does not literally illustrate or paint the object, instead he uses subtle pictorial elements that he adds to the painting in order to create an illusion of a reality that is difficult to be interpreted by the human eye or can’t be seen at all. Such elements may include emotional, social or political messages that add on to the illusion.
In Benefit’s Supervisor Sleeping, Freud addresses the private moment of the nude he draws, trying to depict every single emotion under her skin. He was depicting people in a different point of view in the aim of shocking the public into seeing what is real and the emotions behind the skin, the model was completely nude, no makeup no accessories. Freud is depicting a reality and challenging the gendered meaning of aesthetics that has been dominated by the male culture. His deviation from what is normal to the public regarding a nudes body is quite shocking to the viewer at first hand, and its impressive scale gives the object a dominating aspect over the viewers.
The power that men have over assuming what should be idealized in the body of the woman is linked to the notion of visual pleasure. What is ideally represented is a structure of fetishism. In ‘ Re – imaging the Human Body ’: “For Clark, the female body has been shorn of its formal excesses and, as Venus, has been turned into an image of the phallus. The transformation of the female body into the female nude is thus an act of regulation: of the female body and of the potentially wayward viewer whose wandering eye is disciplined by the conventions and protocols of art.”
Freud through this representation does not emphasize the fetishized aspects that the perceiver expects. If women are objects of aesthetic pleasure then for the experience or the enjoyment of the viewer to be completely aesthetic, the actual expectations of the viewer must be distanced and overcome.
The artist here tries to force the viewer into judging the object in terms of aesthetics rather than what the viewer expected, the fact that his subject is given such power in its size suggest his imposing tone in the Reality he is trying to address. The object’s gaze is inverted from the perceiver in an attempt to force the viewer into looking and it makes it less intimidating to keep gazing at her, this would eventually lead the viewer to detach him/herself from the factor that interrupts aesthetic contemplation which is the sexual desire and would result in a disinterested pleasure in the aesthetic of the object, to embrace the “flaws” and pictorial elements and form an individual judgment about the subject free of any universal agreement regarding objects of beauty and free from a male dominating perspective in representing Reality. This would allow the introduction of women into the experience of the sublime where she is able to evaluate the object as an individual independent of a masculine gaze that frames the woman’s body into a masculine position of appreciation.
The notion of women as subject/ object, and the idea of women attaining the passive role of being looked at is challenged by Freud and so are the cultural obsessions in the wrong image. He tries to allow the viewer to see Reality as it is and to interpret a woman regardless of the viewers desires or expectations and allows the female to play the active role of looking and thinking about the male dominated restrictions and how they are being broken as such. These concepts have been pushed even further in ‘The Plan’, a painting by the British artist Jenny Saville.
She depicts her model from a shocking angle revealing unappealing aspects in a woman such as her pubic hair, as the viewer scans the piece he or she is bombarded by large areas of flesh defined by surgical contour lines that mark areas of imperfection before performing the surgery, after taking a look at the body the viewer is confronted with a woman’s gaze at the top.
The complex moment where the viewer meets the gaze of the woman somehow challenges the idea of woman being represented on a canvas as objects to be merely stared at, objects of entertainment. Again, the artist here attempts to disrupt and challenge the male fantasy by emphasizing the unappealing bodily components, the mind of the viewer hence shifts to judging the object/ subject in terms of aesthetics rather than what was expected, she tries to create a disinterested pleasure in the object in order to shift the focus of the viewer away from desires and closer to the deeper message the painting is trying to address. The Reality Saville is trying to address goes beyond the fact that this model is being represented as she is, a bold body with feminine curves, the model also does not fit into the patriarchal representations of beauty. This reality is emphasized through the surgical marks running across areas of her body, these marks challenge the women that have been affected by the means of making a female “normal” or “beautiful” and tries to make a statement that this act is not only culturally constructed, but also a projection of masculine desires on the female body. Saville also deals with the space in the painting differently, she emphasizes the frame on the large section of flesh which seems to be directing at the pubic hair, and she cuts down the spaces on the body using these surgical lines which seem to emphasize specific areas of “imperfection” and help the viewer question the reason they are imperfect, and based on what is this woman’s body cut down into spaces of imperfection. The surgical lines around the body allow the viewer to see the space in two ways as well, before the surgery, and how the body will be modified after the surgery. The models body position has been shifted from what is usually represented, she is presented in a different context. Saville is trying to break away from the traditional reclining nude poses and is trying to empower the woman with a standing position, she occupies a powerful social status, she is not just an object of the private sphere. The woman is a subject in a her painting, a person with rational thought that gazes back at you.
The fact that woman have always been depicted as objects and neglected as subjects with the ability to gaze back and acquire taste in aesthetics is not just challenged by the fact that her pose is shifted and she meets our gaze, but also by the fact that Saville incorporated her face into the body of the model, it is her face gazing back at the viewer. It makes a lot of emotional difference to know that it is her as an object and her as a subject, it is her rendering her own body. In ‘The Body Recovered’ Saville states : “women have been in being the subject – object, it’s quite important to take that on board and not jut be the person looking an examining. You’re the artist but you’re also the model I want it to be a constant exchange at all times.” This brings back the idea discussed previously, the woman here is allowed to enter as an active evaluator, she is allowed into the experience of the sublime where she is allowed to evaluate the body free of a masculine position of appreciation, she can be a subject and project her own desires onto the female body, she can finally break the gendered meaning of aesthetic objects.
The messages that Freud and Saville are trying to address are similar in many aspects as discussed, one of challenges they present to the public deals with the nude embellished photographs of women released to the public, to what extent are these photographs real? What is the limit for the media behind these photographs and manipulations released to the public?
Kim Kardashian is a contemporary reality TV star, her involvement in the media made her a target of many institutions to represent her to the public in terms of what is agreed upon socially regarding the feminine figure and its aesthetics. Women all over the world are barraged everyday with many images that represent the ideal contemporary female for them to match as well, these representations are male constructed notions of the ideal, they are a construction of the phallus as previously discussed. Their effect on women all over the world has been very successful to the extent it has come to the solution of art that these matters should be addressed to the pubic just as in the work of Freud and Saville.
The photograph is an invasion of a once private moment released to the public. The nude sculptures and paintings to some extent like in the case of the Venus tend to honor the body, to represent a subtle delicate body unaware of its exposure, the pictorial elements suggest a graceful female celebrating her body, however in this contemporary photograph the body seems to exploited in such a manner that challenge it’s purity and delicacy, it is more borderline pornographic. The fact that this picture was not intended to be for pornographic consumption despite the fact that it was taken by a man for a man and the many pictorial elements that embody it such as the opening of the feet, the seductive look, the exposure of the nipple and the placement of the hands, suggest that and make it hard to define the boundaries of what is a pornographic representation of a woman and what is a socially acceptable idealized representation of a woman.
The element of reality is a challenge here as well; the fact that it is a photograph suggests a real medium, it captures the moment as it is, in its exact time and space. The manipulation of this moment breaks the boundaries of this definition, the moment is interrupted by lights, makeup, a well studied seductive pose to increase consumption of this photo by men controlled by their sexual desires; this photo complies to the masculine framing of a woman by a man. It is the ultimate example of what society has agreed upon, it does not attempt to form a disinterested pleasure in the aesthetic, rather it attempts to manipulate Reality to form another reality that conforms with the masculine perceptions of a female, it is a fetishized image. Photographs like this tend to enforce the masculine power over the image of the woman and tend to force the woman to manipulate herself to “fit in” to societal rules. This photograph is exactly what Freud and Saville challenge in terms of Reality. They both seem to address the messages of women being objects excluded from the experience of the sublime and woman being trapped in patriarchy and being photographed by men for men.