This is a little something I have written for Glitter Stump, which will be sold at the 2014 Dublin Zine fair.
From Graham Knuttel's sheer lazy portrayal of women in his work to only 5% of the National Gallery and 10% of the Hugh Lane = collections being by women. You would have to be MRA to not realize that there is a little problem with gender representation in the Irish art world (and obviously the art world in general). In Irish art colleges there is also a gender imbalance with more female students than male. You would think that would make things more equal but no. 43% of regional museums have female directors, but all our national museums have male directors. With (on average) 71% of graduates being women from art colleges, what does this mean in terms of the lack of the female gaze in contemporary and historical art in Ireland and aboard?
(Source Guerrilla Girls 2009/2010)
Irish women artists have been continually overlooked since the foundation of the Irish state, where such artists John Butler Yeats and his son Jack Butler Yeats, are considered the pinnacle of Irish portraiture. Their Irish male gaze of other Irish men, technically brilliant but while completely representative of gender roles in Ireland during their time. Their subject matter (ie other men) can come across as the romantic male bravado when you look at it now. The more known portraits of these men mainly also came from Anglo, upper middle class backgrounds. These pieces of work are also normally titled with their names while the men from working class background aren't named. Which shows the huge displacement in terms of class dynamics and the "gentleman" and the "working man", and of course gender dynamics of that time.
Until the 1960s/1970's, art history and criticism rarely reflected anything other than the male point of view and of course the male gaze, it was completely patriarchal and self absorbed, devoid of an other opinion. The feminist art movement began to change this thanks to Laura Mulvey who wrote Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975 which states the concept of the male gaze, which asserts that all nudes are inherently voyeuristic. Another groundbreaking statement of the political messages in nudity was made in 1972 by the art critic John Berger, In Ways of Seeing, a Marxist critique of the tradition of oil painting subsequently, it's relation to modern publicity and advertising (its something so radical I'm positive it wouldn't have been made today), he argued that female nudes reflected and reinforced the prevailing power dynamics, that is the patriarchy and its relationship between females portrayed in art and the predominantly male audience.
The history of the Naked female figures in imagery can be first found in Venus figurines are found in very early prehistoric art, this figures were crudely made usually from a soft stone. These figures represented fertility deities. Representations of gods goddesses in Babylonian and Ancient Egyptian art are the precursors of the works of Western antiquity.
Portraits of nude women line every gallery and are part of a European tradition of viewing imagery. These traditional classical female statues line every European museum, these women are mysteriously blank, in terms of appearance and lack of body hair and have a distracted, expressionless stare. You can see this from Aphrodite of Cnidus by Praxiteles to Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
With the Aphrodite of Cnidus the statue became famous for its beauty, meant to be admired from every angle, and for being the first life-size representation of the first known nude female form. It shows the goddess Aphrodite as she prepared for the ritual bath that restored her purity (not virginity, but her freedom from adulteration or contamination. Shes completely free from immorality, especially of a sexual nature. Shes perpetually innocent, maybe even devoid of a sexuality even though she is the Greek and Roman god of love and fertility), discarding her robes in her left hand, while modestly shielding herself with her right hand. Her hands are placed in a motion that shields her womanhood and draws attention to her nudity. Her body bends in a contrapposto position, an innovation which realistically portrays normal human stance.
In John Berger in Ways of Seeing he continues regarding the obsession with the the female nude “To be naked,” he argues, “is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude... they are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.” One could understand this view as way of disconnecting the actual women in these images from whom/what they are in order to view the image. These women are purely for decoration, a stereotypical sandwich filler for these male artists and the male gaze.
The women appear fragile, meek, innocent and perpetually innocent, for example in Renaissance paintings, nude women were painted almost exclusively for the male viewer and the male buyer. These women are often depicted with their bodies turned towards the viewer while their heads are turned away and gazing in a mirror, or something else but not looking directly at the viewer, shes slightly suspicious and slightly not aware of what is going on, they seem dazed or preoccupied with something. But the woman is always aware of being the object of the male gaze.
Regarding the male nude, Berger never denies that there are male nudes to be found in Renaissance/Dutch Golden Age/Dutch Masters/Post-impressionist painters/oil paintings, statues and sculptures of strong, macho, powerful and muscular Roman and Greek men.
Instead, what he's commenting on is the way they are portrayed, they are dominating figures in positions of authority and power. These men may be plantation owners, imperialistic murders, colonial rapists, racists, and pedofiles. But it doesn't matter because they are men of importance and wealth, they are someone to aspire to be because of their importance. Even today, when you see an image of naked, sexualized male in the media, the theme behind it is never one of narcissism, vulnerability or sexual passivity. Instead, we see virile, stereotypically muscular men who are more often than not in the process of exerting pure masculine energy, and very little else to be honest. They are strong, dominant, prolific men, they exemplify power and are completely in control of the image of them nude, while the idea of nude imagery of women being controlled by the women in question is only a recent development with the impact "selfie" culture (but obviously nude), via social media such as tumblr, snapchat, twitter. As well of the infamous twitter hashtag #feministbut. But women who upload these images of themselves are censored. Images of topless men can be found all over facebook while facebook support pages for women who have had mastectomies and imagery of women breastfeeding their children, get banned, blocked and deleted. And this is due to woman's breasts only being able to be seen in a sexualized way thanks to the obnoxious male gaze.
With instagram there have been incidents of instagram accounts and/or posts being deleted by instagram, because they are nude or semi-nude images taken by women of themselves.
For example Petra Collins a Canadian fashion photographer, had her own Instagram account deleted, for a photograph of herself with her own pubic hair emerging from bikini bottoms. Collins claims the account deletion was unfounded because it did not break any of Instagram's terms and conditions. Now with #bikini you can hundreds of thousands of pictures of women in their bikinis. Was Collins' account deleted as she believes due to her not conforming to a standard of femininity due to her pubic hair? Another person who has had their Instagram account recently deleted was Rihanna in May. She had flouted Instagram's no nudity policy for a while now, with borderline nude pictures. After she shared images from her latest mag shoot with French publication Lui, where she was topless, Instagram took them down, and threatened to ban the singer if she refused to stop posting topless pics by email. Her response was to post them up on Twitter. She also put some fan art of the Lui cover up, as well as a dowdy fake picture of her captioned "Rih's next magazine cover if it was up to Instagram". Instagram then took her profile offline and leading to an error page. But after a backlash from Rihanna and her fans, Instagram released a statement saying it was a technical glitch. But then her account had been taken down AGAIN. Or did Rihanna just refuse to reactivate her account after being told what she can and can’t do with her own images of her body?
With all the images of her face which were originally taken by the police and then leaked to TMZ after she had been so viciously assaulted by Chris Brown, so readily available in the media and used as a joke. Its disturbing to think that her own body isn’t acceptable when she controls it while her body after being violently abused by someone else is acceptable
I myself a keen selfie extraordinaire, have obvious felt the need to regulate my body from time to time. But the idea of something else regulating my comfort of my own view of my body, and not knowing who did it is quite scary. For example a photo of me on facebook was reported back in April as “pornography”. The photo of me in question was of me in my college studio, wearing a full sleeved pink jumper, pink tights, pink hair and a black skirt. The only "outrageous" thing about me was I had draped these disturbingly phallic sculptures i had made, which were painted stereotypically feminized colours with a glitter overcoat. There was no denying my femininity but someone had obviously taken offense to a cis woman taking the piss with femininity and phallus objects. But maybe they couldn't see why a (cis) woman would be concerned or encumbered with a phallus as they obviously don't have one, and supposedly women don't have zero feelings or desire towards sex.
A few months previously in 2013, another photo of me was also reported on facebook. This was a simple portrait, with me giving a peace sign with my right hand and with the text “kill all fascists” on it. In the end this photo was deleted and I had a three day ban from facebook. Now facebook facilitates grossly violently racist/sexist/homophobic pages calling for the death/deportation/slavery for marginalized people. Or the pages that post highly graphic images of rape and/or domestic violence and the pages that are sadistically homophobic that seem to still stay up even after countless reports. But a selfie of a very white woman with white blonde hair, who’s rather unthreatening, gets deleted for “graphic violence”, because I don’t tolerate the very people who are a very genuine threat to marginalized groups?
Now I can’t help but suspect that my gender plays a role in this. But why did someone go to the effort of reporting these photos in order to control my own sense of self-image portrayed to the world?
With the ridiculous easy availability of porn thanks to the internet, obviously capitalism has used nude imagery in order to sell/make a profit. But in the case of capitalistic advertising, the attractive, slim, perfect human specimens are presented to use to consume. These models don't represent the everyday person, they are airbrushed, photoshopped and controlled, from their pose, hair and makeup, expression, clothes (or lack of). While in classical nude paintings they were created images, you would think real live evidence of people these models would have more agency of their own bodies.
The imagery of them is used only for the stimulating visual pleasure the images provide, in other cases it is due to the relative "rarity" of images of nudity. The use of nudity in advertising tends to be carefully controlled to avoid the impression that the company whose product is being advertised is indecent or unrefined. There are also (self-imposed) limits on what advertising media such as magazines allow, particularly regarding body hair. The female models in question are communalized in order to make profit. The success of sexually provocative advertising is claimed in the truism "sex sells". This nudity is still seen as edgy and rebellious even though nude imagery has been used historically time and time again in visual imagery, the only reason it is seen as “edgy and rebellious” is due to the inability to see a woman’s body as a body and not an object of arousal.
The male gaze's preoccupation and obsession with the idea of nudity, particularly the female nude doesn't seem to be going away any time soon and to go back to Berger and in Ways of Seeing, in regards to male nudity imagery past and present even if they are simultaneously being objectified. If the man in the image is looking in the mirror, or back at the spectator, he seems to be saying, "I KNOW I am handsome and masculine," rather than the blank female stare which is devoid of energy or personality, merely asking to be judged by the spectator and not viewed as a human but only a piece of work. In fact, one of the few places I have ever seen a man portrayed in a passive way is in gay/femdom pornography, and always the receptive, more "feminine" weaker partner. He is meek, vulnerable, objectified, submissive and docile, the gender roles have been flipped in femdom porn but yet femdom pornography is seen as extreme, even though the acts performed by women in femdom porn are common place in “mainstream” porn by the dominant male partners.
For the most part, I would argue that images of naked men are FOR men and MADE BY men just like how images of naked women usually are made by men for men. With naked male imagery it’s for the sake of celebrating masculine power and male dominance. The male gaze is everywhere and continues to control the female gaze and self-image. But the male is always in control whether it’s the male gaze or the male nude while the female nude isn’t always, from who has made the image to how it’s being shared. Their bodies are dominated at every step possible by men.
