last weekend [at least when i first started writing this entry], i went to see nicola in paris. the days can be summarised as going out, musee d'orsay and centre pompidou. the former is housed in an ex-train statin, and we didn't get to venture much int the clock-towery part of the building, but i liked how the hall was set up so you could catch glimpses of paintings at the other side. i don't know how to explain this well, and couldn't find photos of what i mean. anyway, here it is:
i suppose the best way to describe it is to say that as you walked along either the left or right hand side, there was space in which you could see snatches of the opposite end.
anyway, here we saw to two manet paintings which are oft-discussed in their representation of women:
olympia
the luncheon on the grass
olympia was controversial for its time because the female figure is portrayed in a conventional pose for the female nude but is also based on a prostitute (which the black cat apparently suggests). , and which i found to be more apparent in real life). it's perhaps difficult to see .
the luncheon on the grass is jarring for . perhaps what is jarring for me is that i'm nto sure , simply because i am so used to seeing naked women in paintings. the more i think about it, the more creepy the painitng.
i am here mostly rehashing what i remember hearing or reading, as well as gleaning a few things from the much-loved and much-reviled source of wikipedia. but i say all this because links nicely to the exhibition that we saw at centre pompidou, elles.
i really enjoyed the exhibition. the curation was centred around the theme of 'elles' but i think taken from the museum's permanent collection, and was found on the same floor of the pompidou as an exhibition featuring the work of nancy spero. in one room, the paintings/sketches/prints were displayed in a horizontal line across the room, like a scroll, which reminded me of ancient wall paintings -- a sense which was perhaps due to the fact that her work explores (sometimes mythic) representations of women's bodies. spero's work also featured text, typography, which ties in nicely with some work from 'elles' which both nicola and i particularly enjoyed. (nicola's academic work, by the way, is concerned with ways of practicing and performing philosophy which , thus making space for . (i hope this is an accurate summation, anyway)).
mirtha dermisache
&
irma blank
perhaps i should simply let these works stand on their own, and not offer any commentary. they are, after all, about unreadable writing, and expressing some things that cannot be expressed in the form of familiar letters, that language perhaps does not allow or enable women in particular to say or write. nicola brought up that she imagined these women were thinking of things they couldn't express through language as they created these works. i am not sure if this is necessarily true, sometimes i feel such repetitive mark-making is therapeutic. regardless, maybe this is why women 'talk too much and say so little'.
that said, now that i think about it (and thinking about an MA dissertation i got out of the library prior to writing mine, entititled "on writing: redressing the balance" which talks about writing and attitudes towards types of writing (i.e. arguing that the roman alphabet is more abstract (and by implication superior) than other scripts, like chinese or arabic) that these artistic works are quite 'eurocentric'. that said, i imagine similar works could be made using said scripts (or cyrillic or something else) -- and the point is that those scripts are still scripts, even if you don't undrsatnd the langauge, you undersatnd that it is meant to mean something; it already has meaning assigned to it. nevertheless, if such artwork was made using other scripts (arguably the works don't' play off the roman alphabet, but arabic reads left to right, for example, and some asian languages are traditionally written vertically), their power to speak as they do would be lessened, given how almost internationally recognisable the roman alphabet is.
hm! rehashing feminist debates? i'll leave it here for now. and regardless, the reason my absence is for now, unwriteable. (although i have made attempts to articulate it). you shall have to forgive me for it, that and my forseeable sporadicity.
what i meant was that i hoped that each piece expressed its own particular flow of thought; that behind the creation of each piece was a flow of ideas, feelings, relations, expressed through the progressing marks. the reason i feel this way is that i think that this way the pieces retain something of "writing" as opposed to being "just" mark-making; the intentionality of expression flowing in a disordered-orderly fashion, one perhaps more apt to that of the thought processes themselves.
ReplyDeletei think that in this way there is a twofold function: 1) they are, as barthes said of dermisache's work, "unreadable writing", and in this way perhaps draw attention to the particularity of the thought processes themselves and the impossibility of truly understanding the thoughts of another (an Other) upon reading their writing, thus they serve to undermine the system of writing, by overtly thwarting the attempt to inhabit the other's thoughts. 2) more subtly, there is the suggestion that this is indeed, subversion aside, a more apt or accessible means of communicating "as a woman". my work focuses on thinkers who have noted that women are systematically and necessarily excluded from the entire system of philosophy and indeed language itself (phallogocentrism).
i find it interesting, for example, that these works are displayed in a case in a museum; some of blank's works are books after all, but are displayed behind glass, rendering their functionality as such useless. this links to the issue of whether any attempt to philosophise "as a woman" is fated to be deemed "mere" art or poetry, and where the locus of philosophising-as-such really is.
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ReplyDeleteI remember reading/hearing that one of the reasons 'Le déjeuner sur l'herbe' was so (apparently and contemporaneously) shocking is because it features a sole naked woman amongst clothed men (the other woman is lightly dressed, of course).
ReplyDeleteI love both of these paintings by Manet.