How Should Women Be Depicted In Art?
By: Lizzie Bestow
Tags: Women, Writing, Feminism, Art, Philosophy

How Should Women Be Depicted In Art?

Revisiting Feminist Aesthetics

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

A recent controversy has occurred over a statue here in the UK. The statue depicts Mary Wollstonecraft, the noted women’s rights advocate. It was created by Maggi Hambling, an often controversial sculptor. She likes to create work that is something of a talking point.

But some think that her depiction of Wollstonecraft is a step too far; she is completely naked, with pubic hair, and perfectly-plump breasts. The unveiling of said statue has prompted articles listing figurative pieces of women who “don’t have their fannies out”.

The treatment of Hambling’s statue is understandable when you think about the history of women’s depiction in art. There’s often been an element of objectification involved. Indeed, Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘the male gaze’ in her polemic on sexual objectification, titled ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.

What’s The Male Gaze All About, Then?

According to Mulvey’s term, women are seen as the passive objects of male desire through their positioning on film. This theory has also been applied to literature and artwork.

One example of the way the male gaze might be enacted on film would be from the director’s chair; shooting the film as if from a man’s perspective (i.e., the film is shot over a man’s shoulder). The camera might linger over a woman’s body in a way that is violating and exploitative; men may not be subject to similar shots.

The Male Gaze in Literature

Patricia E. Johnson wrote The Gendered Politics of the Gaze: Henry James and George Eliot; a really interesting article that we looked at in my aesthetics reading group at Durham University last year. Johnson strongly discourages the notion that a novel is a kind of “blank slate” on which we view the characters from a hilltop view. Instead, the author can instill various prejudices within us:

‘Telling a story and “looking” at characters are interrelated activities’ — Patricia E. Johnson

The author tries to instill a certain perspective on us. And this perspective is not without some sort of prejudice; it has some sort of value attached to it. Johnson draws on Michel Foucault, who:

‘…makes clear that the gaze is connected to power and surveillance: the person who gazes is empowered over the person who is the object of the gaze’.

Johnson notes that much of Western art and Hollywood movies are based on these implicit power balances. Think of films like Fast & Furious. Matthew Kieran, in the context of a definition of obscenity, says that ‘Buster Keaton’s films always represent women as shallow, giddy or stupid and someone might worry that [this] may cultivate morally dubious attitudes…but no-one would seriously condemn these kinds of films as obscene’.

Buster Keaton’s depiction of women in film is bad, upsetting, and even rooted in prejudice and discrimination. Moreover, it entices you to think the same. Obscenity, for Kieran, is a kind of stronger version of this enticement; its portraying things like sexual assault in a seditious manner; a manner that idolizes the attacker and blames the victim (based on what the victim was wearing or doing before the attack, for example).

Johnson draws on Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, both classic realist texts. In both these novels, the protagonists are envisioned as artwork by a male viewer. Jean-Paul Sartre would say that this is an example of making someone a being-in-itself or an object. Sartre believed that humans, as conscious autonomous beings, were beings-for-itself.

Yet viewing someone (in some sense, looking at anyone at all is grounds for making them some form of object; for Sartre, my observation of you is me objectifying you in some sense because I will always fail to perceive you as a complete and whole person, because you are just however you look to me, rather than how you appear to yourself), but especially viewing them as a mere vessel for human desire, objectifies them. It fails to grasp their full human consciousness. For Johnson:

‘Both Isabel and Dorothea [the protagonists of Portrait of a Lady and Middlemarch respectively] are viewed by other character in relation to, or even as, artworks, and both struggle to see life and art for themselves’.

In both cases, the omniscient and omnipresent author directs the viewer's gaze.

Societal Right

But why was there such uproar to Hambling’s statue? Because some women are angry that men felt that they had the right to represent women in this way; to represent women for their own consumption. To deny women their own sexuality, but instead contextualize their sexuality within the confines of a man’s desires. For Linda Nochlin, Johnson asserts:

‘the male artist’s right to represent women is interconnected with the assumption of general male power over and control of women in society’

So, what’s the solution? Should only women depict other women? Well, Hambling is a woman, and many people still think the statue is exploitative and disrespectful towards Wollstonecraft. It might even be classed as objectification; the statue focuses on Wollstonecraft’s naked body, her physical attributes, rather than her ardent fight for women’s liberation. And men often depict women in a sensitive and meaningful way, a way that gives autonomy to the woman portrayed, rather than takes it away through objectification.

Also, objectification doesn’t necessarily have to involve nudity, or men depicting women’s nudity. That can be very respectful, too. Many men have also depicted women as subjects, rather than objects. Charles William Mitchell’s painting of Hypatia (1885) depicts the nude mathematician and philosopher at the hour before her death. I believe the painting is respectful. Some might think it isn’t.

Ways of Seeing

For Johnson, Henry James’ protagonist Isabel in Portrait of a Lady ultimately lives up to her titular constraints; her body is displayed in the Western tradition of the “female nude”. In one scene, she is placed in an art gallery, among statues and paintings, and thus becomes artwork. We, the viewer, see Isabel through the eyes of her love interest. He watches her and appreciates her as an artwork. James offers no commentary on whether his depiction of her is right or wrong. She becomes an object to us:

“This picture is made to appeal to his sexuality. It has nothing to do with her sexuality”

Isabel herself does not challenge this depiction; she ‘pliantly offers herself for viewing’. We can analyse this interpretation of Isabel through reference to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, his riveting book based on a television series of the same name, that sought to discover and critique the hidden messages behind the way images appear. Isabel’s image has been carefully-constructed by James, but it’s an image put forward with the eyes of her love interest. She is reflected in his gaze.

It’s important to take notice of how a novel directs the reader’s gaze; are the women depicted through reference only to male protagonists or antagonists? Are the women’s bodies being sexualized by others, and are they complicit in this sexualization or not?

How Ought We Depict Women?

For Johnson, Henry James’ depiction of his protagonist is exploitative. But how ought we depict women? How can we avoid the male gaze? Well, while Henry James attempts to naturalize the male gaze (presenting it to the reader as if it were “just the way Isabel ought to be viewed”), George Eliot questions the gaze as toxic to women and possessive in nature. While both novels have an “art scene” — where their protagonist is viewing artworks — the authors respond in markedly different ways.

In Eliot’s art scene, the narrator is not depicted in relation to the male love interest. Dorothea quickly moves away from the sculptures and artwork when she realizes that she is being watched and viewed. Her character considers her own beauty and who owns it; she considers a kind of Western collector syndrome (in reference to art, but this, of course, has a second meaning, symbolic of a desire to possess and collect women) and, Johnson thinks, this is meant to critique the way male artists feel entitled and defined by their representation of women.

Dorothea is not complicit in her own objectification. Isabel is somewhat complicit. But the problem isn’t so much depicting someone being objectified. It’s important that authors produce work that reveals the hallmarks of objectification so that readers can recognize objectification in their lives and attempt to free themselves from its chains.

Henry James does not do wrong by noting Isabel’s objectification by her love interest. But he does do wrong by portraying this as a positive thing. In the same way, I do not condone sexual assault by writing about my experience with it. In writing and speaking about how sexual assault transformed my life, I draw on personal experience to highlight how destructive experiencing sexual assault can be on someone’s life. But if I were to depict sexual assault as a positive thing, that would be different.

Ultimately, the onus is on the author (not his characters) to question societal norms and offer up alternative ways of looking at his characters. James does question and contests the male gaze, but he ultimately offers no other perspective on his protagonist. So many of the men in his novel are spectators, viewers, and collector — both the villains and the good guys. This also seems to include the narrator, and perhaps even the reader.

Feminist Aesthetics?

My reading group looked at an article by Elizabeth Garber (‘Feminism, Aesthetics, and Art Education’) as the genesis for an exploration of feminist aesthetics. She begins that seminal article with this remark:

‘If any generalizations might be made about a feminist approach to aesthetics, they are that gender is a factor in how we understand the world and art, both cognitively and emotionally, and that gender as a central and defining influence has been overlooked in traditional philosophy.’

Garber relays Gisela Ecker’s sentiment that, for the feminist aesthetic theorist, the evaluation of art must be ‘thoroughly genderised’.

But is it a good thing for us to categorize art by the gender of the artist? It might seem so, at first.

The Myth Of Gender Neutrality

For the feminist aesthetic theorist, the myth of gender-neutral art and literature persists. This means that art is analysed by critics, historically, without much reference to the gender of the artist. This is true especially when the artist is male.

Garber writes:

‘Gendered assumptions exist in concepts assumed neutral and universally desirable, such as rationality and autonomy”.

A female writer might historically have been critiqued for being female (see: the derisive term “women’s literature”), but it is rare that a male artist’s gender would have been noted as anything of importance. There’s not really been such a thing as “men’s literature”; there’s literature that might perhaps appeal to men more than women, on average, but that’s hardly used in a derogative way like “women’s literature”. So, categorizing art as “women’s literature” in an empowering way — literature that is directed towards women, evoking a kind of shared experience, can be a positive thing. But can art be gender-neutral? For some feminist theorists, no.

Challenging Tradition

Feminist aesthetics, according to Garber, aims to challenge certain traditional aesthetic notions like objectiveness and detachment. Aesthetic theorists have often proposed a kind of disinterest ought to take place when one views art. We ought to view art in a sort of disinterested way in order to distinguish it from other kinds of pleasurable activities. This, some theorists have claimed, is what makes the aesthetic experience unique.

For example, the theatre owner who watches a new performance might have an interest in what’s evolving before her eyes; she wants the performers to do well as otherwise, her business might go under. That’s not to say that she can’t have a disinterested experience; but to do so, she has to remove the interesting feelings from her evaluation. Kant was one of the first aesthetic theorists to propose disinterestedness as a pre-requisite for the aesthetic experience, but it’s a long-standing notion in aesthetics.

It’s easy to see why disinterestedness might be important; the theatre-owner, viewing her production from a monetary angle, is clearly not aesthetically appreciating the play. But she can, if she adopts a different attitude; and she can certainly switch between the two. It also allows us to separate the appreciation of art from the appreciation of other things — like food — where the pleasure is more ends-focused.

While you might love a particular dish — or love to eat! — eating food is primarily an end-driven exercise. You eat to fuel your body. But why do we appreciate art? It doesn’t seem at all end-focused. Disinterestedness can help us explain that; we don’t take pleasure at the end of the task, but we take pleasure in the means. Kind of like love. You don’t really love someone for any particular reason, or for any particular end. You just do it.

Feminism, Garber says, ‘falls in large measure within instrumental theories of art because it arises from the socio-political goals of the women’s movement that include alleviating the oppression of women’; trying to create new meanings and subjectivities that reflect the myriad needs and experiences of women. Feminism is aimed at social change; so this detachment of aesthetic enjoyment isn’t facilitated in feminist thought.

I’m not quite sure I agree. I rather like Kant’s disinterestedness. Of course, it is flawed in a few aspects. Kant’s ‘Problem of Disinterestedness’ left scholars scratching their heads for centuries. But I think it explains that intuitive feeling we have about art; where we don’t desire it for any particular telos (goal). I think a lot of people would also have intuitive feelings about the theatre owner.

Another example would be the music student who studies Mozart’s Symphony №40. If that student merely studies the music in order to play it for an exam, is he really appreciating it aesthetically? A lot of people would say no. His goal is passing the exam. It’s a utility-driven exercise. Which is fine. No one’s knocking that.

I think it’s actually good to be able to flick that “aesthetic” switch off once and a while. We could all sit around appreciating the beauty of everything, but — realistically — nothing would ever get done. That’s kind of what I thought about Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. He’s so obsessed with living life to the moment that he can’t settle for a single second. He has to be constantly creating and subsequently moving on to the next thing that’s coming his way.

Pure aestheticism maybe made a few people fall in lust, but it never helped raise a family, hold down a stable job, or support a loved one through a really tough time. The student is right to focus on the theoretical aspects of Mozart’s music — the notes, the tempo, the beat — rather than how it makes him feel. His examiner isn’t going to be interested, really, in how beautiful the student thinks the symphony is. But the key thing here is that the student is listening for an educational purpose — not an aesthetic one.

The Female Aesthetic

Garber discusses the search for a particular female aesthetic. Her article is a response to Lucy R. Lippard’s question ‘Is there an art unique to women?’

The question explores the possibility of there being such an art category, rather than an art form (like painting) — although qualities of such art may apparently involve ‘parabolic bag-like forms’ (a parabola is a kind of curve, but that’s all I can illuminate on) ‘veiled strata’, ‘associative fragmentation’ and ‘autobiographical emphasis’. Now, the latter, I can get behind. I do think that the work of women does tend to be more autobiographical than that of men.

Frida Kahlo is cited as producing autobiographical paintings; I think Sylvia Plath also has something of an autobiographical oeuvre. From my own reading, I’ve found that women do tend towards drawing from their own experiences. But that might just be because I like semi-autobiographical fiction, so I could be slightly biased here; or, part of the reason I’m more prone to enjoying semi-autobiographical fiction might be because I’m a woman.

Interestingly, Lauren Rabinovitz, in a 1980–1981 work, defined characteristics of a feminist aesthetic as including:

The artwork encouraging active participation from the viewer

Traditional “women’s crafts” being considered worthy of the label “art” (often, knitting, crochet, and embroidery have been considered “women’s work” and hobbies, rather than artwork. Is that because of the work itself, or the gender of those who were most likely to be creating that work?)

Female imagery can be used without objectification or misappropriation (Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze” is useful here).

The creation of artwork should involve collaboration with other artists of equal status.

It’s worth noting that some feminists certainly wouldn’t endorse Rabinovitz’s criteria. Garber claims that:

‘Feminism is not a fixed set of principles that can be applied as a template over the discipline of aesthetics. Feminism is varied and continues to evolve; it is not a single position or approach to understanding.’

So, some feminists would disagree that, for example, feminist aesthetics involves collaborative artwork. Their own criteria might differ greatly from Rabinovitz’s, and that’s okay.

The Female Sensibility

Lippard also believes there’s a kind of sensibility that women possess when viewing art. In her 1976 article, she wrote, ‘I know that a certain kind of fragmentation, certain rhythms, are wholly sensible to me even if I can’t analyze them”. It’s a kind of women’s intuition particular to art.

I do think that we respond to art, partly, based on our previous experiences in life. Of course, there is some art that brings people together despite those persons having little to no experience of the content of the artwork. I’m sure Picasso’s Guernica will continue to bring audiences to tears, long after all those with living memory of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica (or any connection to the event at all) have passed away. I knew of the event after I saw the oil painting, and I still found it deeply tragic.

We feel the emotion the painting expresses because we can relate to it on some level. We’ve all suffered in some way — even in a minute way — although that suffering may be nothing compared to the terror of the citizens of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. When we look at the painting, we recognize a little of what it is to experience that emotion, and we feel a little of the horror that the inhabitants of Guernica felt.

So, in that sense, I do agree that there might be a certain female sensibility. Reading a work like The Handmaid’s Tale or Jane Eyre will be a little different of an experience for a woman to the experience of a man; partly because a woman may have lived experience of the kind of sexism that’s occurring in the book. I don’t know if I think there is necessarily a female sensibility, though.

I don’t know if there would still be a female sensibility if (conceptually-speaking) the world was perfectly equal in its treatment of men and women. I don’t know if it’s a gender thing; I think it’s more of a socio-political thing; a kind of circumstantial thing. Jean-Paul Sartre said that literature presents us with a “double, simultaneous” postulation; that the same passage in a novel can address two groups of people at the same time.

What’s The Problem?

Some who are against the notion of a “female aesthetic” have argued that the presentation of activities traditionally associated with those who have been born as women — such as birth (Garber here draws on Judy Chicago’s The Birth Project) might tie them to their biological functions. It might also be considered as exclusionary to non-binary persons, those who identify as women, and transgender women.

Ultimately, my reading group decided that Chicago was re-appropriating the supposed “women’s role” as life-giver for the better. I said nothing, because I was the group organizer, and so the facilitator of discussion (as it should be, in philosophy) rather than the empire of debate. However, I think I lean more towards criticism. I do think that focusing on such topics might be harmful to women as a group.

Conversely, I think that as society becomes less and less focused on women’s reproductive capacities, fewer women will paint such artwork or write about such things, because it will be less of a central focal point in their lives. I think much of the reason women focused on concepts like reproduction was that society told them that their reproductive capacities were their sole source of value. They wanted to claim that back for themselves as just one of many sources of value in their lives. As things have become gradually more progressive, the focus has softened. It will continue to soften.

Who Should Art Be For?

This speaks to a wider conversation about who exactly art is for. Millions pass through London’s Tate Modern a year; how many of those people look at the paintings adorning the walls and think that they’ve been represented, that art has been for them?

Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George are an interesting duo. They’re artists who work in the medium of sculpture, but also produce films and drawings. They’re distinctive-looking: they only ever wear suits, and they’re conservatives; a rare breed in the art world. I wear a lot of strange-looking vintage concoctions, so I highly relate to this aspect of their identity. They met at Central St. Martin’s, but they moved away from the institution and its prescriptive attitudes to art to create their own form. A lot of their work is highly humorous (see this 1969 piece, where they sought to pre-emptively deflect criticism from their suited and booted appearance), and often highly vulgar. They seek, they say, to ‘produce reality’, but also to ‘create a totally new world’; a kind of utopia. They want to show the world as it could be.

Gilbert and George have been described by Brittanica as:

Gilbert & George, British collaborative team made up of Gilbert Proesch (b. Sept. 17, 1943, Dolomites, Italy) and George Passmore (b. Jan. 8, 1942, Plymouth, Devon, Eng.), whose dynamic and often humorous insertion of themselves into their art proved an important chapter in postwar British conceptual art…in a challenge to the methods taught at St. Martin’s [where they met], they began to blur the distinction between their “real” life and their artistic life. By 1969 they were presenting themselves as living sculptures…in which they drank gin, smoked cigarettes, repeated particular phrases, moved about slowly, and so on. With these irreverent and insouciant activities as well as their later artistic endeavours, Gilbert & George sought to question — among other things — the fetishization of the art object. They claimed their entire lives as art.

Their work provokes various and complicated emotions in me. I like a lot of their sayings, like this one:

“Life is a holiday compared with what is to follow”.

But they can sometimes come across as trying to provoke controversy for the sake of it. Reading Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, George says, of religion:

‘We find the superiority of the people in charge oppressive. It’s the same in southern Europe when we stay in small Spanish or French towns over Christmas — you see people coming from the churches, and then you see the superior vicar walking through the streets with his papers under his arm and his head in the air. He doesn’t even speak to the people — they are superior, horrid types.’

In saying that, they seemed a little superior to me. I’m not religious myself. I certainly, however, don’t think that most heads of churches and the like are superior, or that they want to inspire a sort of deferential inferiority in laypeople. Gilbert & George themselves, in the same interview, note that ‘all these poor people’ are ‘being completely oppressed by this fascism of faith’, and that it’s this that divides people and reduces the quality of their life.

Democratic Art

Gilbert & George argue for a kind of democratic art. They argue against pushing people out of art and want art to be a talking point for people.

“Art for all” is the credo of Gilbert & George, who met in 1967 while students at St. Martin’s in London. Transcending the modernist tenets of Conceptual, Performance, and Process art, the duo gained critical acclaim for their legendary 1970 performance The Singing Sculpture, in which they established themselves as “living sculptures.” Since, the duo have been known for their cultivated public persona — they appear in public only together, wearing distinctive suits and insisting that their lives and their art are inseparable. Gilbert & George have expanded their practice over the past decades to a variety of media — books, film, painting, postcards, photomontages — their signature style drawing on a Pop sensibility and the appropriation of mass media images. Swinging between the whimsical and the obscene (one series depicted bodily fluids and sexual acts), Gilbert & George have explored a wide breadth of subjects pertaining to race, sexuality, religion, and mortality.

Gilbert & George want to connect with others through their artwork, and they don’t want art to be really “highbrow”. It’s hard to categorize their work because it ranges through so many mediums and depicts so many different things. It does often centre on mass media and our relationship with it. Their work always, however, connects with the external world; it depicts a utopia that’s realistic, that could be reached. But is their slogan possible? Can all art really be for everyone?

Art for All?

Much of art in the Western tradition has been exclusionary. It’s sought to push out those who had no formal education in art and art history, most clearly seen in the category of the outsider artist; a person who was outside the art world for any number of reasons and so designated an outsider artist.

Modern art sought to be egalitarian, but some think it’s just as snobby and classist as it’s always been. Here, the comic Micky Flanagan discusses how his working-class roots in East London made him feel at odds with the kind of elitist modern art which is no longer about appealing to others’ emotions through depicting shared trauma or lived experience but instead slashing a bit of canvas and titling it something like ‘untitled number fourteen’ or ‘the eternal fight between communism and capitalism rears its ugly head as the world burns part sixteen’. When people are struggling to put bread on the table, why should they really care about that? It doesn’t depict their experience of the world, does it?

But it might also seem that art shouldn’t be democratic. Can an artwork really be meaningful for absolutely everyone? Surely we draw on our life experiences when we view art — they inform our opinion of the artwork we are viewing. We all have different life experiences, and so how can art appeal to us all? In democratizing art, do we water it down? I’m not sure. I think that artwork can and should appeal to lots of people — art can tap into that shared humanity we all have, after all.

However, I also think that art can (and perhaps should) speak to different people in different ways. Feminist art can make women embrace their bodies and reclaim their sexuality. It may also inspire that feeling in men — which is really good, too — but I feel it’s far more likely to produce that effect in women because it’s made by women, who are drawing on existing in similar gendered bodies that have been subject to unwanted sexualization. I think art should be for everyone, but not all art; maybe some artwork is directed towards certain groups, like women, and that’s a good thing.