Is Objectification Always Bad?

I wondered this as I looked into a shop window, in Santa Paula, a small town in California that was my home for 10 months, with an 80% Mexican population. The window display was filled with Catholic figurines, like the Pope, Saint John Paul II with Mother Theresa. There were also a variety of Jesus on the cross figures, heavily decorated. I noticed that the Jesus figures were androgynous in both their facial features and the shape of their bodies. Utterly attractive, they seemed to embody both a masculine and a feminine perfection. It was as though the sexual availability of the naked flesh, and his tragic skin lacerations made the Jesus figure a fantasy space for everyone. It was then that I wondered if offering oneself up for objectification could ever be considered as a generous act.

Jemima Stehli

Jemima Stehli has taken up the position of the stripper in her photographs, whilst also locating questions of power in the artworld within a voyeuristic framework. In her series Strip (1999) she stands with her back to the camera, in front of a seated male, identified only by his job title, for example, ‘Critic’, ‘Writer’, ‘Curator’ or ‘Dealer’. A long cable release is visible in the male’s hand and in each photograph Stehli is in a different state of undress; caught in the act of stripping. The precise moment the photograph was taken during this private strip is controlled by the seated male, his power doubled through the status of his role in the artworld. And yet, he is the pawn within Stehli’s game. It is she that has created the scenario, it’s her concept, her brain, her skill and her body being displayed. She is active. The seated male is unable to not look, he must play the stooge. It is his level of satisfaction or discomfort that we see in the photograph. Is that us, the viewer looking at ourselves?

Me and Laura

Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ became some kind of remedial text applied with frequency to my impasse at CalArts. This well written and convincing text served to make me feel guilty about what I wanted to do in practice. It also became a gateway to Kaplan, Doanne, de Lauritis and Modeleski. I needed to make work and I had to read a lot of material in a short space of time. The voices merged into one and I became alienated and overwhelmed by their high minded approach. However, I was attracted to their certainties, the tone of voice so authoritative and sure. The tone and their attachment of the spectacle and pleasure in film which they actively disavow becomes something ripe for parody. The question is whether or not this is something I want to explore in my work.

Why I am not a dancer

Dancing has been my hobby for some 25 years. Over the last ten years I have considered my role in dance as a participant outside the normal trajectory. I am not professional-dancer material and so a career within it could not open up for me. Having performed on the Sheffield City Hall stage in the biannual dancing school shows, and then to collect my BA (Hons) degree, I perceived my interests converging in a rather interesting location.

With a chance encounter with some photographs, my art practice shifted to investigate some of the interesting problems I observed through my dancing. With my experience of wearing the most day-glo kitsch outfits as part of a line of dancers my perspective on spectacle is one of first hand experience as well as that of the well-informed spectator. I imagine myself performing as I watch dancers because I have performed.

When I went to CalArts to study, my regular dance classes ceased. For the first time in many years I did not have a regular dance practice. The pressures of the environment meant I lived in my brain, and I began to really investigate my stake in thoughts on the body, from an outsider position.

I am very happy to report I have now found some very challenging classes and I am confronting the reoccurring preoccupations in my art practice along side a regular dance practice.

Après-coup 1

As a Germaine Greer feminist since my early teens, I understood problems of the patriarchal construction of societal norms. Post-feminism via the Spice Girls interrupted my teens and I claimed my body by wearing the shortest of mini skirts and the smallest of triangle tops only marginally more modest than the smallest string bikini and danced all night in clubs, catching the first bus home in the morning. It came as a total shock that my nights of fun could be misinterpreted as a display for men, when someone put their hand up my skirt. Some kind of bubble burst. I had been sold some dodgy rhetoric.

Secrets of The Boudoir Burlesque: An Audience Dresses

Winkle pickers, black shirt white waistcoat. Silver ballet flats, hookeresque platforms, red patent t-bar, 2 flapper head bands, 3 feather hair clips, fishnets, patterned tights, lots of black, feather boa, 1 scruffy couple, top hat, red stilettos, puff ball skirt, patterned dress with leggings with pixie / cowboy boots, stiletto platform oxfords, jarvis cocker with longer straggly hair, plaid shirt, jeans and doccers, purple chiffon wrap dress with boach, mini top hat, blonde dreadlocks (girl) with duffel coat, black trousers, Eastpak and trainers.  Fishnet stockings with visible suspenders, sparkly puff sleeves, man with dreadlocks, red and black corset with puff ball skirt, gatenet tights with patent black shoes, black dress with silver sparkles, red lippy with hair band, pin strip suit with waistcoat, shiny suit, grey suit, black shirt, purple tie and bald head, red tennis shoes, slacks and stripped shirt. Green strapless dress matching shoes and black jacket, 15 denier black tights. Sloochy top, mini skirt, leggings, big biker boots, addidas trainers, brown leather jacket and jeans, tartan skirt and black corset. High necked slinky dress with red and white corset, pink beanie hat, black layered frilled skirt, gothic flouncy coat, curler-ed hair. Flat shoes, vest top, satchel, curly mop over one side with stripe shirt, black waistcoat, converse with suit, glitter beanie, white thin cardie over dress, red corset with black lace, pencil skirt exposing hip bones.

A Page I Inserted into A Library Book At SHU (with thanks to Kim Noble)

Kim Noble gave me a homework assessment - to find a library book, rip out a page and insert my own page, looking exactly like the original.  I found a book I love 'Popcorn Venus, Women, Movies and the American Dream' by Majorie Rosen, a kind of love letter to the stars of Hollywood, with historical contextualisation that takes in the social status of women at the time the films were made.  I couldn't bring myself to rip the page out, it felt too important in its analysis of Rita Hayworth in Gilda.  I did slip in this new page though.  


212           THE FORTIES - NECESSITY AS MOTHER OF EMANCIPATION

I am interested in asking whether it is possible to claim Rita Hayworth as a feminist icon.  She is my heroine.  I love her.  And, so does Majorie Rosen.  She says some great things on the previous page about her sexuality.  In one line she states that through her performance of 'Put the Blame on Mame' in Gilda she is saying 'This is my body.  It's lovely and gives me pleasure.  I rejoice in it just as you do.'  That’s a great idea.  I think that exemplifies why I like that performance so much.  I want to do a performance where that’s what my performance says.  That's about as subversive as you can get with the male gaze.   A disregard for it because you are so pleased with yourself.  Is that ever possible, do you think? 

However, this page makes me sad.  This book is written in 1973 and the writer does not know that Rita Hayworth was the victim of early onset Alzheimer's Disease.  In fact, the disease was far less understood then than it is today.  When Rita had difficulty remembering her lines on set people thought she was an alcoholic.  She started to drink because that was what everyone said about her.  She was unemployable and became a joke in Hollywood.  Her daughter by Aly Khan, Yasmin Khan, nursed her at the end of her life.

She infamously said that men fall in love with Gilda and wake up with Rita.  And here we have the problem of Rita Hayworth.  Her image as a sex symbol is so wonderfully joyous, so celebratory.  She IS an incredible dancer.  But, her life story and the biographies of her life paint her as so deeply tragic a person.  She was repeatedly raped by her father and entered marriage after marriage with men who exploited her.  But she said, looking back on her life, that she did not want people to be sad when they thought of her, she wanted to be remembered as giving joy. 

Interestingly, one of her closest friends and confidants throughout her life was Hermes Pan, a choreographer she met on one of the films she did with Fred Astaire.  It's as though her really understood her because he understood her as a dancer and that’s where she lived.  She was a dancer first and foremost.  I maintain she was the best partner that Astaire ever had.  Way better than Ginger.

Lower down on this page there is a sentence underlined.  I think it deserves to be read as a stand alone sentence, without reading on:  "1946 emerged as a landmark for the female breast".

I like this book because the author reads the text and image of film, something I do as an art viewer.  It's a slightly instinctive.  It is interesting because she uses a personal subjective approach that was outmoded with the semiotic and psychoanalytic methods of the film-feminists later in the Seventies and Eighties.  I get more out of this style though, and I return to this book often.  It's not printed anymore so it's hard buy.  Sometimes it comes up on Amazon, but they are ex-library copies with stamps and marginalia.  I want a clean copy!  A similar book 'From Reverence to Rape' is still in print.  I wonder why that is.