***Announcements***• Both screenings on ‘BODY’ (Monday, 3 & 10
Dec.) also in 225, Business School.• This Wednesday (28 Nov.): instead of seminars,
a DROP-IN session for all, 10am-12pm:– Any questions/issues– MWW brief 2
• Seminars resume next week: – Group 1: 5 Dec. 10am– Group 2: 5 Dec. 11.30am– Group 3: 12 Dec. 10am– Group 4: 12 Dec. 11.30am
MWW: PROJECT
• Poster submission date:
Monday 17th December• Time & venue tbc
• Poster display tbc
• TWO chosen objects: may or may not include the one you’ve been working on
• On TIME or PLACE
BODY & the critique of VISION
• Vision linked with knowledge & understanding– Cf. dead metaphors: ‘I see your point’; ‘being left in
the dark’; ‘clarity’; ‘epiphany’; even ‘theory’
• Vision linked with power & control– Cf. Bentham/Foucault: panopticon
• Vision linked with desire & pleasure– Cf. John Berger; Laura Mulvey (‘scopophilia’)
• Art and the (other) senses
Allen Jones, Chair. From the series Women as Furniture (c.1969)
Laura Mulvey, ‘Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or “You Don’t Know What is Happening, Do You, Mr.
Jones?”’ (1973), in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989)
‘The achievement of Allen Jones is to throw an unusually vivid spotlight on the contradiction between woman’s fantasy presence and real absence from the male unconscious world. […] the image of woman comes to be used as a sign, which does not necessarily signify the meaning “woman”.
‘Women are constantly confronted with their own image in one form or another, but what they see bears little relation or relevance to their own unconscious fantasies, their own hidden fears and desires. They are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet, in a real sense, women are not there at all. The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man. […] The time has come for us to take over the show and exhibit our own fears and desires.’
Jemima Stehli, Chair (1997/8)
The Nude &/vs. the Naked• Distinction introduced by Kenneth Clark in
The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (Penguin, 1956)
• The NAKED = simply unclothed; found everywhere through time
• The NUDE = – a form of art (GR, 5thc. BCE); Western– nakedness: a pretext– an ideal vehicle for ALLEGORY – Nakedness (in)vested with meaning
‘Apart from biological needs, there are other branches of human experience of which the naked body provides a vivid reminder – harmony, energy, ecstasy, humility, pathos. […] It seemed that there was no concept, however sublime, which could not be expressed by the naked body, and no object of use, however trivial, which would not be the better for having been given human shape.’
Capitoline Venus (Roman copy, c.100-150 AD of Hellenistic original, c.340-30 BC)
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude (Routledge, 1992)
• Uncovers the ‘active/passive heterosexual division of labour’ in Clark: mostly female nudes discussed from a male perspective
• The nude = ‘flesh tamed by form’
• Femininity = also in need of ‘taming’; more liable to be out of control; more dangerous
L: Venus of Willendorf (c. 24,000-22,000 BCE)R: Venus de Milo (2nd c. BCE)
Giovanni Battista Moroni, The Vestal Virgin Tuccia (Chastity) (c. 1555)
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
• Thresholds of all kinds (temporal, bodily, architectural) give rise to anxiety and need to be managed e.g. through ritual
• Bodily orifices – sites & symbols of the vulnerability of the body
• Structures of ideas also vulnerable at their margins
SO:• Permeability = dangerous and anxiety-inspiring• Containment = security
At least 3 different bodies
• The represented body
• The body of the artist
• The body of the viewer
The Artist’s Body
• Always there! But sometimes more obviously than others
• E.g. self-portraiture
• BUT: not only present as representation but inscribed as active agent (Pollock)
• BUT: not only surface (Hatoum)
Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31 (1950)
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
Categories of the Sign:
• Icon– Resemblance (visual)
• Symbol– Convention (arbitrary)
• Index– Trace (physical)
Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger (1994)
The viewer’s body
• Viewing as encounter• ‘Reception’ never in a vacuum: personal history,
knowledge, experiences, state of mind• A sentient body (NOT just vision)• 2-dimensional vs. 3-dimensional: installation
issues• Art and/as life
– Cf. Dalziel & Scullion, The Horn (1997): an invitation to the passing driver to re-view their familiar environment (the transformation of a non-place?]
Art & the sensesAnya Gallaccio, Because Nothing Has Changed (2003)
‘Feelings. They make a body “real”’. (Amelia Jones)
Daniel Joseph Martinez, to make a blind man murder for the things he’s seen, or happiness is overrated (2002). Life-size, cloned, computer-controlled, animatronic cyborg, sculpture in a room installation.
Mieke Bal: ‘sticky images’[Jacques Villeglé, Carrefour Turbigo (1967)]
‘They make you dizzy from the back-and-forthness between microscopic and macroscopic looking where no eyeglasses or contact lenses will do the job. Looking itself becomes tortuous, almost tortuous.’
Further Reading (optional)
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
• Amelia Jones, Self / Image (2006)
• Lynda Nead, The Female Nude (esp. 1st chapter) (1992)
• Marina Warner, Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985)
See also BRIEF
Preparation for the seminar(NOT next week’s drop-in session!)
Do either or both of the following:
• Make notes on the screening(s) and be prepared to discuss them in class
• Start rehearsing your poster (cf. MWW Brief 2)
