EVENT REPORT – PUBLIC LECTURE. PROFESSOR AMELIA JONES
ON ‘QUEER AND THE LIMITS OF FEMINISM’.
MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY WEDNESDAY 20th MAY 2009.
A lecture organized through Manchester University and sponsired by Queer Up North (QUN). My second and sadly last chance to attend one of the events at this year’s extensive and very impressive QUN festival, following my modest choir member role in the unique and unforgettable YOU WHO WILL EMERGE FROM THE FLOOD Aquatic opera presentation with Juliana Snapper in the lead role on Sunday 17th May.
This is my perception of the points raised by Professor Jones – not in any sense a verbatim transcription. I found myself picking up on some points at the expense of others, and many points set me thinking on a course of my own, which has to some extent influenced this report. It is more about what I got from the talk than necessarily exactly what was presented. In many ways trying to present Amelia’s case too much like she did would do her a disservice anyway – though I hope nothing I write here does injustice to her terrific presentation.
Prof. Amelia Jones is a leading art historian, and she lectures in Manchester, (though she is soon moving to Montreal). She spoke in great depth on gender politics, feminism, perception and aesthetics, illustrating her points with a superb slide show presentation of work ranging across time from the Renaissance to 20th Century cinema. She condensed complex ideas into a 45-minute presentation and took questions from her audience who filled the hall to its seating capacity. There were about 230 of us there. She asked what queers could do for feminism, and the opposite too – what can feminism do for queers?
The lecture touched on many areas of interest to me.
Literature & Philosophy were my degree topics on the mature student
Humanities BA course I did between 1997-1990.
Aesthetics and Sartrean Existentialism were
among my favourite studies. My writings, non-fiction and erotica especially,
have been modestly influenced by gender studies and I have increasingly
recognized my own queerdom (See AM I QUEER?) without seeing that as something to fear or
feel shame about.
Beginning with the Renaissance, Amelia reasoned that the artists and scholars set art on a largely scientific course, trying to capture precise realistic likenesses of what was painted and sculpted to freeze in it time, place and posture, in effect giving the artist and the observer control of the object studied. It was forever there to be perceived.
An example of this Amelia focused on strongly was Albrecht
Durer’s c.1525 woodcut study, Draftsman
Drawing A Nude. Here, a very
methodical artist is seen looking at the nude model through a lattice grid, in
effect enabling him to concentrate on drawing his model in small square
sections, bit by bit, mastering each inch of her flesh by degrees. The
approach, genuinely used by artists of the time, in effect, allows for strong
attention to detail and a focus on realism. It looks as if the model is being
clinically scrutinized.
The situation remained relatively unchanged through the many periods of art history until taken up by the French Existentialists, notably Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone De Beauvoir.
Much of Amelia’s argument was based around Sartre’s theory of The Look. I hadn’t realized how much of an impact this theory has had on queer theory until now.
It was Sartre’s observation, in Being & Nothingness that a man voyeuristically watching someone through a keyhole believes that he has control over what he perceives. Then, suddenly, a third person is present, and the voyeur is now at the mercy of the person who could potentially see him, and judge his actions. To Sartre, existence is largely a state of the Bad Faith of being aware of being in someone else’s perception or in trying to subject a person to our look - our perception of them, just as Durer’s Draftsman has his model in a place where he can draw her bit by bit at his will. Sartre largely dismissed Freud’s perception of the fetishised object reminding us in all ways of sex, for a perception of people in states of Bad faith being either slave or master to others.
The stance, taken up by feminists like De Beauvoir. (Sartre’s lover for many years) in her famous work The Second Sex, was heavily influential on feminists, and on other libertarian civil rights groups, and in time, a huge influence on queer theory, as to be Queer is largely to step out of the perception by which another would empower themselves by trapping you. Much modern art becomes queer art, by how it messes with perception, and expectation. While much traditional pre-war Western art reduces the subject to something static, queer art has Durationality – it shifts the focus of the beholder and makes its own meaning less apparent, if not impossible to pin down.
Much modern and post-modern art disregards conventions and deliberately dissolves away binary identity political views. It’s an invaluable weapon for challenging preconceived notions and social prejudices. One illustration presented shows US President Barack Obama wearing a tee shirt bearing the legend ‘This is what a feminist looks like’.
Perception of us by others can be dangerous and based on faulty observation. Amelia highlighted the tragic case of Jean-Charles De Mendez, a Brazilian man shot in London by police marksmen when they saw him as having the look of a suspected terrorist. They read him completely wrong of course, but acted on the look - their own prejudicial preconceptions, failing to allow for any evidence that could tell them their way of seeing the situation was incorrect. .
Images were presented of black models with deliberately exaggerated skin colour and Negroid appearances, in effect challenging the viewer to ask if they see the subject in such extreme distorted perspective anyway. Such art tells us that sometimes it is our way of looking that is at fault. Amelia emphasized the importance of having a politics of ‘identification’ (as a process), and not an identity’ fixed, rigid and static.
Laura Aguilar presents a portrait of herself nude In Sandy’s Room. What is the viewer to make of this? A large woman is relaxed and shamelessly comfortable in her nudity in a room belonging to another person. Is it the room of a friend, relative or a lover? Does the model have permission from Sandy to be there? We as viewers don’t know. The model is relaxed but we are left slightly troubled by that and the image is unmoved and indifferent to what effect it has on us.
Some queer artists take to playing heavy with distance between observers and observed in their art, and examples of extreme close up art and photography were presented.
Susan Silton presents images of herself in a speeded up blur of motion, or with her face distorted by pressing hard against a glass surface. Some close ups are so intense that objects become impossible to identify without labels and titles on the images giving clues. One image presented by Amelia was of a close up of an anus that resembled a black hole, swallowing all the light and substance round it.
On the theme of close ups, Amelia was full of praise for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up, (A favourite of mine but not one I’ve seen for years) and how it highlights a photographer’s failure to use his skills to capture a point of perception that may be real or imagined. During an outdoor photography shoot on the edge of some woods, the London fashion photographer (David Hemmings) thinks he may have seen a dead body lying just to the edge of the shot. He begins to blow up (present a series of increasing enlargements) of a photo, to see if he can perceive the ‘body’ properly and have proof that he wasn’t imagining it all along, but as the photo section is grown, it distorts, making it impossible to analyze the situation. On returning to the location, the photographer finds that the body, if it ever existed, has now gone forever. His perception is rendered powerless, useless. The World perceived has defied his sense of ability to master it. Being queer does the same thing – it frees the queer from being controlled by the labeling perception of others. The queers short-circuit the gaze imposed on them.
Amelia received much deserved applause and took questions from the audience – My own observation was that the artists cited were shaking other people’s perception of them, while I felt unable to do that, being unsure of my own identity anyway. I don’t even know how to look at myself, let alone at others. Amelia observed that this might be exactly how the artists want their audiences to think.
A lively, good humoured, highly intelligent talk A fact-sheet list of all of the artworks cited would have been useful, as there is much I was unable to note down.
Though Queer Up North’s festival is to continue for several more days, other commitments keep me from being able to attend more events. I am eternally grateful for what I did get a chance to see and do, though. The talk was quite a contrast to YOU WHO WILL EMERGE FROM THE FLOODAnd I felt as if I learned a lot here too, about The World, and my own queerdom too.
JUST SOME OTHER WORK CITED IN THE
LECTURE
Ron Athey – The Solar Anus Inspired by Georges Bataille’s short essay of the same name, presented by Athey as extreme body art.
Judy Chicago – Red Towel – Realistic art depicting, for the first recorded time, the removal of a tampon – the image is not recognized for what is by many perceivers, including several women who use tampons, and highlights our ignorance of many women towards their own bodies and needs. Chicago presents a great deal of such menstruation art.
Barbara Kruger - untitled photograph, but often called ‘Your Gaze Hit’s The Side Of My Face’. A photograph of a woman’s face in the stone profile of a Renaissance sculpture, with the caption Your Gaze Hits The Side Of My Face’ clearly printed there. Here the observer is made to feel guilty. After all do we stare at other people like this to? Our look here gets an aggressive retort, almost an accusation of committing an assault – our gaze obviously doesn’t hurt the photo, but it can hurt a person. They will be distressed about how we re-define who and what we see, empowering ourselves at their expense. The picture is telling us not to stare, even though it is before us for display purposes.
THINKING ON BEYOND THE LECTURE
Some aspects of the talk were worrying for me personally– not because I disagreed with them in any way, but because they gave me a sense that my own way of seeing things is as orderly and neat as that of a Renaissance artist (even if I’m often a slob in practical situations). As a Humanistic atheist, rather than an Existentialistic one like Sartre, who’s work I find appealing, but too pessimistic, I have always seen the Renaissance as the Golden Age beginning point of the philosophy that largely defines my personal post-religious beliefs. I studied the Humanities academically and later became the elected secretary of a Humanist organization for a decade. Humanism begins in the Renaissance. See my review of Nicholas Walter’s HUMANISM – WHAT’S IN THE WORD for its history and definitions.
Here, the Renaissance I always saw as a break-through period of enlightened thinking, was made to seem terribly restrictive and conservative, rather than a period of creative liberation. My own approach to writing stories tends to be very controlled, conforming to beginning, middle and end principles, with my poetry veering from free verse to formal metric structuring. Just as I’m smugly enjoying thinking of myself as queer, I find I may not be queer enough, dragging the baggage of so much traditional intellectual thinking along with me.
There is something comforting in being able to order and label the world around us. Cartographer’s set maps that we can follow to our destinations – even Sat-Nav depends on things being where we expect them to be. The problem is people don’t stay put like Belgium or the kitchen do. Nor should we. We should not be pinned down like butterflies in a collector’s display case.
My Catholic school education, and later entanglement with a cult put me in situations where powerful people tried to make me fit the perception of others, rather than have their perception of me change. Cults do this. They don’t try to accept us as we are or even try to see what we might be like. They smash us apart and try to rebuild us to their specifications. If you find a piece doesn’t fit a jigsaw, you don’t smash it into place with a mallet. Cults, military training, etc, do. Indoctrination turns us into automatons, ready to be programmed by others. The cult I got trapped in didn’t do as promised and help me find me – they tried to take the me away and replace it with a ‘them’. They failed and something got away – a new me, but I always wonder what happened to the old me. My sense of identity has been fragmented ever since.
To Sartre, how other people looked at us was less important than our own perception of the Look. To adjust your life to the gaze of others and think of yourself as essentially what others see in you is Bad Faith Much Queer art referred to by Amelia seems to be based on the premise that the looker is a very real force and that the observed has a duty to deflect and manipulate how he or she is perceived. Queer art isn’t something passively helplessly being stared at, and defined by its audience or critics but something that will confound the expectations of the looker, engage with them in dialogue and if necessary, fight back. Imagine you went to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. You would expect Da Vinci’s La Giaconda to be as she always was and that you could voyeuristically admire her from opening time until the gallery closes if you wished. What, however, if she winked at you, or suddenly asked you what you think you’re staring at? Queer art has a way of grabbing you by the throat like that. It can shake your sense of ability to observe right to the core.
An oil painting portrait is as trapped in time as someone who has stared at The Gorgon. Relationships and genders need not be so fixed and rigid. The element of unpredictability, the casting off of labels, and breaking free of the box is what makes us – not how comfortably we stay in the box. To some extent, we have to conform and play the game. If we want to get and keep a job, we have to persuade the employer that we are the kind of person he expects us to be. The actor has to play a role for the audience. Olivier had to be Hamlet – not Olivier. Sometimes, though, the role takes over, and we think what we play is the real us. The Beatles wrote of Eleanor Rigby, ‘Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door’. We do that, put on different personas, and faces, for whom we are seen by – we mask ourselves, trying to manipulate the looker and if we get too comfortable in the mask, we forget to remove it, or think it was our real face all along. I’ve always wondered which is my real face, but I lost track of it somewhere along the way. I think of myself as what I do, rather than who I am (whatever that is). I tend to sum myself up by my job history, my latest hobbies, my writings – but that’s not me either, or is it? Not queer enough? Or too queer for comfort? I don’t know where I fit into the spectrum, and probably never will know. (Not sure if I’m even saying that as a bad thing).
We live in an increasingly paranoid and intrusive society. The State wants to ’look’ at our every move. CCTV camera culture means we are looked at without anyone necessarily looking at all. They can play us back later at will, and trap our images on digital soul-snatchers forever. The authorities look at us trying to see a potential child molester or a terrorist within. The threat to introduce compulsory ID cards in the UK means even more ways to subject us to the look are arising, and those who seem, in the eyes of the Nanny State, a bit queer, are likely to get more scrutiny than many others. . Empowering ourselves with cloaks, question marks and ambiguities is an important defence tactic.
Another worry for me is that I am aware that as much as I would rather it was otherwise, I am not only seen – I am also a looker. We all are. Only blinding us as Oedipus did to rid himself of his complexes, or going into total hermitic isolation would stop being seen and us seeing. The World and its people come into our field of vision. We have to deal with that. People come into my field of perception, and it worries me that I might say or do the wrong thing. Am I seeing you correctly? How do you wish me to perceive you? . I can stare at a work of art forever, but I now feel I am treading through a minefield if I look at others. Is my perception of them in keeping with their wishes about how I perceive them? Would they wish me not to perceive them at all? Do I need to finds a better way to look? Yes. Perhaps the famous British spectacles advertising slogan should be on my gravestone one day – ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’.
Until my death I am still a work in progress, not yet
finished, not yet officially unveiled. You can see what I let you see, but it’s
only a preview. The finished work could be completely different. Watch this
space, but ask yourself how you are looking at me too.
LINKS
PROFESSOR AMELIA JONES ON WIKIPEDIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Jones
GEORGES BATAILE’S SOLAR ANUS – (FULL TEXT) http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/solar.htm
LAURA AGULAR – IN SANDY’S ROOM http://www.cla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Corinne/Images/aguilar1sm-m.jpg
RON ATHEY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Athey
JUDY CHICAGO – RED FLAG http://www.mum.org/armenjc.htm
SUSAN SILTON http://www.freewaves.org/festival_2002/artists/silton_s.htm
BARBARA KRUGER – YOUR GAZE HITS THE SIDE OF MY FACE http://www.usc.edu/programs/cst/deadfiles/lacasis/ansc100/library/images/541.html
FILM – BLOW-UP http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060176/
QUEER UP NORTH Green Fish Resource Centre, 46-50 Oldham
Street Manchester M4 1LE http://www.queerupnorth.com/
Arthur Chappell
LINK TO THIS PAGE http://arthurchappell.me.uk/event.review-queer.and.the.limits.of.feminism.htm
LINKS TO OTHER PEOPLES PAGES E-mail arthur@chappell7300.freeserve.co.uk
UPDATES MYSPACE - http://www.myspace.com/arthurchappell
FACEBOOK - http://profile.to/arthurchappell/
FACEBOOK BLOG http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=85623
MY BOOKS - http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=952521
MY TWITTER PAGE - http://twitter.com/arthurchappell
