Bits and Pieces

While the text listed the spectator, the gaze, and spectating, it wasn’t as specific with one other aspect of the relationship: the spectacle, or what is looked at. I was working on choosing texts for next semester, so Euripides Medea has been on my mind. Medea flying off to Athens at the end of the play in a chariot pulled by dragons is what I usually see given as an example of spectacle as per Aristotle and his unities of drama. As I was perusing possible translations, there was repeated reminders that Euripides’ audience was much more familiar with Medea’s back-story and her marriage to Jason of Argonaut fame (Medea literally saves Jason’s hide). I thought it interesting that spectacle, as a concept at least as old as the Greek dramatists, was not specifically mentioned.

An interesting twist on Foucault and Bentham’s inspecting gaze and constant surveillance in our world—perhaps this is why vampire stories are so prevalent in our society today. Part of the vampire myth is that vampires cast no reflection; in the British television series Ultraviolet, the inability to cast a reflection is extended to technologies such as telephones, photographs, surveillance videos, and answering machines/voice mail. The only way to see them is with the eye. A danger/predator that cannot be detected or recorded by technology is certainly very provocative.

If the spectator does not know what an odalisque is, will he or she see a painting such as Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque as orientalist? Why is this woman Turkish? I’m northern European and she is no darker than I am. She is wearing a turban, but that was a popular hat style during the Napoleonic War years (watch Jane Austen films and note the hats, especially for evening wear). Before commenting on western women appropriating the head gear of eastern women, note the role of women’s hats in western culture. To me, she is just a woman. There appears to be a hookah off to the side of the painting as well, but unless you know what it is, it is easy to overlook. The Guerilla Girl Met poster is interesting in its argument, but I noticed that the poster also slyly directs our gaze to where it WANTS us to look—yes, it visually uses the Ingres painting (an example of French Neo-classicism), but the text limits the statistics to art and artists represented in the “Modern Art sections” of the museum. I’ve never been to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the Modern Art sections of the art museums I have been in would not be the sections I would expect to find a painting such La Grande Odalisque (Magritte, Rothko, Picasso—yes). What about the artists and nudes in Medieval art? By limiting the statistics to Modern Art, the Guerilla Girls exclude the male nudes of ancient Greece and Rome (the Greeks didn’t portray women completely in the nude until Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Cnidus), and other artistic periods in Western art as well that may have had women actively painting or sculpting (Angelica Kaufmann was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy). But we weren’t supposed to notice that the stats are limited to certain sections—just the 3% of artists and 83% of nudes that are set off with purple ink, rather than black ink. The poster also doesn’t address the number of women who were art patrons and collectors (Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine the Great, to name a few) whose private collections form the core of some of these art museums (like the Hermitage—named after a painting in Catherine the Great’s bedroom). One of the explanations I have read on Vermeer’s domestic interiors is that a female viewer would have had more access to the paintings (the men being off fighting wars and trading). I will warrant though that there are more male artists and female nudes represented in museums.

I take exception to the statement that the mirror convention in paintings of Venus establishes her gaze as narcissistic. There is a convention in classical art that only deities are portrayed in the nude, so are these female nudes with goddess names actually human? As for Aphrodite/Venus and the mirror—narcissism gets its name from a male character in mythology. While a mirror is one of the attributes of Aphrodite (she is, after all the goddess of beauty), it would have been an item only the wealthy could have afforded in the ancient world where this association originates. Mirrors could show literacy (why inscribed them if their owner couldn’t read) and have scenes from mythology on them. Mirrors were also dedicated by women to various deities (male and female) and appear in bridal art. While a mirror may have symbolized vanity during the Renaissance, it was more a symbol of femininity and grace. (this info comes largely from a book entitled Women in the Classical World by Elaine Fantham, Helene Peet Foley, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy, and H. Alan Shapiro).

Were the Calvin Klein underwear and perfume ads homoerotic, or were they being used to market the products to women, who may be in a position to buy the items for their men? I just remember an awful lot of the ads being used to decorate women’s dorm rooms when I was an undergrad, but not in the rooms of gay friends.