& back to the nakedness...

(Channeling a certain sock frog) Why are there so many essays about prostitutes?

Ok, so I know that we call it the world's oldest profession for a reason, but were there really so many more prostitutes in the 1870's than now? To read feminist art criticism you'd think you couldn't walk the streets of Paris without, well, bumping into women who were also, ahem, walking the streets. It's ridiculous! Ok, so there were lots of women who were too busy keeping up appearances to actually enjoy living in a civic atmosphere, and there were also, certainly, people exchanging sex for money, but you are going to have a hard time convincing me that there were not the majority of women in between, much as there are now, and there always have been. Personally, I take a little offense to the conventional wisdom that all barmaids and waitresses of the 1880's were also on the game. How could starving artists afford so much sex they had to pay for, and also pay for their bar tabs and afford a studio? It just doesn't make good economic sense- why pay for sex, not to mention model's fees, when you could probably get away with dating someone who wasn't obsessed with her reputation? Why do we have to assume that there were not social contracts back in the day similar to now? Yes, ok, if you wanted to be married, and you wanted that lifestyle it was something you had to "protect," apparently. But why do scholars so often look down on, or just disregard, the mistresses and kept women? Women choosing not to get married, but to also have the standard of not being exclusively flesh for hire?

I find this idea perpetuated frequently, and it really annoys me (obviously). I mean, think about literature- You have female characters in Dickens, Austen, Hugo, etc. who may be taken advantage of, but are certainly not for sale. The middle class may not be a liberal as today, but there were women who could muddle through being single and not obsessed with their reputations, I'm sure. You can also look at the life of Colette, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette) and see that some people were able to be quite openly bi-sexual and scandalous and able, oh my goodness! to contribute to the artistic dialog at the same time as making plenty of money!

It seems to be that writers such as Griselda Pollock (did her Daddy give her that name?) want there to have been a boys club that was somehow easier to win your stripes in if you were a man than if you were a woman. And, it's true, the Salon did accept a lot more men than women. But look around now at colleges and grad schools- you'll see that from the top down there is a shift in gender. There are generally a majority of male professors, followed by about equal numbers of men and women in the grad departments, and an overwhelming majority of women undergrads. What happens between those two times? Well, in my informal experience, I would say that the majority of male professors are, not surprisingly, married to women they went to undergrad with. The women are busy taking care of the kids and the house, generally holding down a job, and not making any art work until their kids hit college. Try telling these wives of professors that they aren't artists and you'll get your nose rearranged. It's hard now to have a family and an art career. Imagine how hard it was before birth control!

I find it hard to believe that the women who were the dancers or actresses in these paintings did not think of themselves as artists. Or that these women who modeled did not have an opinion of how they were drawn. Just because none of their thoughts or drawings ended up on display does not mean they didn't contribute to the dialog. They just didn't contribute the same way men did in this particular city in this particular era.

For example (and not harp on this too much) think of the visual effect of the relationship the actress Sarah Bernhardt and Alphone Mucha had, by all reports a non-sexual one. Actually, let's just take Sarah Bernhardt as an example for a second- Daughter of a Jewish courtesan, a courtesan occasionally herself, she went on to become the world's most famous actress. Apparently having a "bad" reputation didn't hold her back- she even mothered an illegitimate prince of Belgium and starred in the title role of Hamlet. I challenge Griselda to name an equally famous french stage actor with anywhere near the fantastic reputation.

Maybe women didn't care about painting quite as much, and found doing other projects more interesting or rewarding. I certainly do the majority of the time, and I'm a modern girl.

I resent that Paris was seen, is seen, as the center of the world at this time. What about the rest of France, where perhaps women were furthering the traditions of pottery, or the culinary arts, or spinning and dying, or weaving, as in Lyon? Who care's that there were a bunch of good ole boys in some city? That does not have to represent the entirety of male/female relations for an entire generation in an entire country.

But the presumably sexist paintings of Degas and the crew remain what people talk about. And they try to compare the relatively clumsy paintings of Cassat as if they were masterful. I do like her more than Renior, but just because all her characters seem to have their clothes on doesn't mean that her work isn't just as sexually charged as her male contemporaries. For example, if "girl in blue armchair" had been painted by a man (or "Psyche," perhaps) it would have been seen as fairly scandalous. The girl looks positively wanton, if you want to look at her that way. But most people don't. I can hazard a guess that a lot of people looking at Degas see a love of women, not an abuse of women.

I've lived with reproductions of Degas somewhere in my home most of my life. I find that the body images he created, those of women bathing, dressing, dancing, and most of all of women waiting to do something, say a lot about female musculature, and therefore strength and poise. I don't care how he got to make those images, or where that particular wash basin was located. What I care about is how beautiful the representations are. I care about the exciting use of color and line, and the amazing understanding of space and form.

Even in our "enlightened" times, women don't like to draw women. As a model, I know women hate to draw women because I watch them fidget for the first half hour. I hate to draw women, too. I don't feel comfortable with a model for a long time, because of how closely they resemble myself. For at least the first half hour I either want to feed them or tell them to go home. But I'm used to getting up on the modeling stand in front of 12 or more men, half of whom will inevitably draw my breasts first. But, really, if they are good drawers, they see me no more lifelike than a bowl of fruit. I suspect that these same men, if confronted with a male model, would more than likely head home. But both genders are more comfortable drawing women naked than men. Male models have to deal with problems of visual arousal, which keeps a lot of them from being able to relax and be good at their jobs. But also, as a woman, I don't freak out when people stare at me. My flight or fight instincts are not triggered by a man looking at me, or even a group of men looking at me. Most of the male models I know actually have to train themselves not to panic the first time they are up on the stand, even if they have their clothes on. To establish a relationship with a male model is harder for both parties, and I think that's probably one of the reasons that fewer men are featured naked after the Grecian era.

But why would I want to not understand the way an artist looks at a woman with desire? Desire is a legitimate way to look at another person. We are not all academics, we artists. Drawing dead bodies is one whole school of study, and I am uncomfortable looking at paintings, such as Francis Bacon's, that show people who look nearly dead. But I wonder why it is unacceptable for Degas to have an intimate relationship, possibly built on mutual respect, if not actual affection, for the naked ladies and young dancers that he drew. The biggest hurdle in this discussion I think, will be the acknowledgment that the relationships artists and models have are often a lot more complex than critics would find convenient, and do not always indicate an exclusively economic exchange.

Distinct Lack of Naked Ladies!

This is the 3rd time I've purchased "the Anti-Aesthetic, essays on Post-Modern Culture." Each teacher has wanted us to read different essays, though, so I had not read Jameson's "Post-Modernism and Consumer Society." The thing that stood out about it most, upon first reading, was that it didn't contain any naked ladies.

mod·ern·ism/ˈmädərˌnizəm/Noun
1. Modern character or quality of thought, expression, or technique.
2. A style or movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms.

post·mod·ern·ism/ noun /pōstˈmädərˌnizəm/

1. A late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.”

So, as a historian (haha) I object to the whole progressive concept of modernism. There were so many breaks from so many different time periods in artistic history I think it's just sort of dumb to think of one of them as being more radical than the others. I don't get how modernism is more modern than, say, impressionism, except for its existance in more "modern" times. It just seems sorta silly to me as a name. So postmodernism seems, well, outright ridiculous. Which I guess is right there in the definition- "a general distrust of theories."

Specifically in this essay Jameson deals with "pastiche" and "schizophrenic" theories in postmodernism. He basically defines pastiche as parody without the comedy, (which sounds tedious), and schizophrenia as being something akin to the experience of Billy Pilgrim's becoming unstuck in time. If I'm understanding him correctly, and I very well may not be, his definition of postmodern art is art which evokes a sense of time (place, action) we can't quite put our finger on, yet we sense it's familiarity. In other words, postmodernism is that creepy sense of de ja vu that apparently occurs more regularly in epileptics. Saturated with time and signifiers but only conscious for, and in, an instant.

I don't understand why these labels and time periods need to be differentiated, or why they couldn't exist contemporary with each other, as schools of thought not periods of time. Actually, I'm quite sure that they did, along with neo-classicism and a whole bunch of other made up genres.

It has been hammered home in all these other naked lady essays that one of the great works of modernism, Demoiselles De Avignon, was an attempt to return to a primal, pre-classical aesthetic. So perhaps postmodernism is really just calling a spade a spade- saying that all works of modernism were indeed, already, postmodern. Wouldn't that be pre-modern? Let's just say it's all garbage and be done with it!

This goes back to the first mini- essay I wrote, where Linda Nochlin observed that the women of different eras were more likely to make work of that era rather than work that was distinctly feminine. It seems to me that one could postulate that artists were almost exclusively, throughout time, making work for the same fundamental reasons- they were capable through access to materials, they were being paid or in some way rewarded for their talents, and the work that they were making interested them. This has never changed, from neadrathal through neo-classical times. Artists will make representations of the fundamental things of importance in their times and space. Sometimes these things will deliberately be nostalgic, sometimes deliberately futuristic, for as long as there is a concept of past and future. Bu they will always be of their time. You can't change a Roman copy into a Greek original.

Exotic Naked Ladies.

Another day, another Nochlin, this one titled "the Imaginary Orient."

I love Oreintalism. It's some of my favorite work, to be quite honest. There is something so NOT real about it. In this regard I completely agree with Ms Nochlin- it's more like a gallery of taxidermy than a trip to the zoo. She calls it (and I like this term) "the apparent absence of art" meaning that there are some, not many, instances, especially within these paintings that tend to be of slave girls in exotic locals, of actual observation without embellishment. Certainly the tile work that is ubiquitous is actually taken from real details.

But here are paintings, especially the Gerome "Slave Markets", where French men are hiring French (or recent immigrant) models (read PROSTITUTES, lest we forget the real vocation of these yummy looking creatures according to most art historians) to pretend to be Persian girls being traded in an open air market. These are fairly accurate and very sexy paintings of hairless white girls being poked and prodded and bid upon by "oriental" (read "Moslem") men. And yet, in this article, we didn't have to talk about male dominance? I guess because it's obvious here, as opposed to being implied by Picasso and the like. Here we have detailed women against detailed backgrounds of exotic locales, and because the objectification is obvious it is not noteworthy. And that is just fine with me!