The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men

Abstract

The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men CHEIM & READ NEW YORK CITY JUNE 23-AUGUST 31, 2016 Artists have always flattered those with the most power--and money--by giving them what they desire to view, and for most of Western history it has been white heteropatriarchy that has been in control. A wise cultural critic would say it's therefore no surprise that many of the images made by and for men are of desirable women. But hindsight is 20/20, and it's only due to some smart deconstructionist theory that we now understand the complex politics of "looking." In 1972, John Berger illustrated how a culture's "ways of seeing" are determined to a large degree by dominant social groups' subject positions and experiences. Drawing a direct expressive parallel between Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's La Grande Odalisque (1814) and a Playboy pin-up, Berger opined that the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men--not because the feminine is different from the masculine--but because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. (1) Three years later, Laura Mulvey furthered Berger's ideas in her psychoanalytically grounded essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975). Mulvey posited that mainstream cinema was centered upon the dualistic paradigm of "active/male" and "passive/female," ultimately making women the object of the "controlling male gaze." The idea that men do the looking and women are there to be looked at wasn't novel, but it was finally exposed for the social construct it is. Michel Foucault summed it up later that decade with his theories on surveillance, linking the "inspecting gaze" to power. In the intervening thirty years, academics have built upon and challenged these ideas, but always conceded that looking is inextricably bound to power. It seemed curious, then, that in the 2009 exhibition The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women, curator John Cheim conjectured that a female artist's gaze is somehow different from a male's. The press release stated that the group show would "debunk the notion of the male gaze by providing ... works in which the artist and subject do not relate as 'voyeur' and 'object,' but as woman and woman." Basing an exhibition on artists' gender identities is itself a perilous endeavor, but the presumption that there is no power dynamic simply because both artist and subject are women was naive at best, and willfully essentialist at worst. One such example from the 2009 show, Lisa Yuskavage's Heart (1996-97), in which a masturbating, pig-faced nude floats in a vacuous pink halo, certainly insinuates that women are more than capable of objectifying other women. It's even more problematic when the curator ignores the complexities of spectatorship. In that same exhibition, Sally Mann's Venus After School (1992), in which her pubescent daughter reclines a la Renaissance odalisque, also fouled Cheim's thesis. The photograph was taken by the subject's mother, but through the eyes of the heterosexual male gaze its subject could still be read as a tempting Lolita. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Unfortunately, The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men didn't fare much better in its presentation of the gaze, spectatorship, and power. It begged more or less the same question about the thirty-eight pieces on view that it asked in its earlier iteration: "Would we react differently to these works if they were made by a man?" Well, the pat answer is yes, because stereotypes run deep and rampant, but why we would react differently is never contested. The show did claim to "directly address gender and sexuality," but such simplistic phrasing in a summer of uproar over transgendered bathrooms ended up seeming intellectually lazy. Make no mistake: this was a phenomenal line-up of artistic talent, skill, and sagacity, and it was a pleasure to see so many works by women in one space. …