"THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ART AND EXHIBITIONISM" by Germaine Greer

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ART AND EXHIBITIONISM

Why do so many female artists put themselves in
their work - often with no clothes on?

Germaine Greer

January 28, 2008

It was my good fortune a week or so ago to hear
the Luce annual lecture on American creativity,
given by pioneer feminist art historian Linda
Nochlin. The title of her lecture was Dislocating
Tradition: Women Artists and the Body, from
Cassatt to Whiteread. Having for years grappled
in vain with the peculiar role of the body as
both medium and message in women's art, I
hotfooted down to the Royal Academy and prepared
to have my perplexities unknotted and my
vestigial puritan revulsions dispelled.

It is a truism of feminist history that women
have been regarded primarily as body, passive,
fertile body, as essential to human survival as
earth. If women artists were ever to engage with
anything, they were going to have to engage with
body as earnestly as Cézanne engages with
landscape, and so they did. The model became the
artist, but at the same time she clung to her
role as model, so that she became her own
subject. At first, this was manifest in a
tendency to produce an inordinate number of
self-portraits. In 18th-century France, Vigée-Le
Brun never tired of painting flattering portraits
of herself, which was quite a good move for a
society portrait painter, who was expected to do
a similar job on her clients. At the same time,
Angelika Kauffmann produced dozens of dreamy
versions of herself not only in portraits, but
also in allegorical paintings in which she
figured as the personification of art or music or
both. Frida Kahlo could engage with no subject
other than her fictionalised and glamorised self.
Her proliferating faux-naive paintings are
advertisements for the performance that was her
life.

For the women artists of surrealism, in the words
of Whitney Chadwick, "the idealised version of
the woman as muse was no help ... rejecting the
idea of the Muse as Other, they turned instead to
their own images and their own realities as
sources for their art. Even when the subject of
the work is not the self-portrait per se, there
is a persistent anchoring of the imagery in
recognisable depiction of the artist." The
thought of art as solipsism has me tearing my
hair. The convention of the muse is simply a
trope figuring forth male creativity; if the
convention was useless to women, they could
simply have done without it, but, as most of them
also chose to become sexually involved with male
artists, they wasted a good deal of time playing
the muse's illusory role, apparently unaware that
the muse is rarely the artist's actual bedmate. A
male artist's recognition of his consort in the
role of muse is mere gallantry. Why did the women
artists of surrealism have to follow such a
sterile, narcissistic paradigm? As for their
images being recognisable, they made sure of that
by posing for at least as many photographs as
they made paintings. Most of them put more paint
on their faces in a lifetime than they did on
canvas.

The advent of performance art produced a tide of
women artists, many of whom were not content with
starring in their own show without stripping.
Since the 1960s, when Carolee Schneeman took off
her clothes to perform art in New York basements,
I have wondered what the connection might be
between art and exhibitionism, and why it was
that so many of the nude female performance
artists had beautiful bodies. Could it have been
coincidence? Even Helen Chadwick, a serious
artist, took pride in displaying her own
wonderfully elegant young body when somebody
else's would have done.

Professor Nochlin explained to us that Sam
Taylor-Wood's Portrait (1993) in a Fuck Suck
Spunk Wank T-shirt, with her trousers around her
ankles, was a "marvellous parody" of Botticelli's
Birth of Venus. She pointed out that the cabbage
on the table was a reference to the volute out of
which the goddess steps in Botticelli's painting,
but she didn't explain why Taylor-Wood chose to
pose herself and let someone else (Stephen White)
take the photograph. Any of Taylor-Wood's
art-school chums could have put on the T-shirt
and adopted the pose, and Taylor-Wood could have
taken the photograph herself. Sarah Lucas's
self-portrait with fried eggs on her chest was
correctly described as "as arrogant as any male
portrait", but why did Lucas pose it herself? The
fried-egg reference would be as appropriate to
any other woman, no? Why is Tracey Emin the
subject of all her own work? Is this good or is
it pathological? Why does Jenny Saville
deconstruct her own body? Why can't she use
someone else's? There is a possible answer, which
is that the use of the nude is necessarily
exploitative, and therefore a female artist who
needs to use a body has no option but to use her
own, but surely it can be no more than a
sophistry. Why does a female artist need to use
flesh in the first place?

The feminist art historian can no more ask these
questions than she can ask why most women's art
is no good. Her duty is to cry up women's work,
to see it as reactive and transgressive, as
dislocating tradition indeed, when the painterly
tradition is always being jolted and set off on
contradictory tangents, more often and more
fundamentally by men than by women. The woman who
displays her own body as her artwork seems to me
to be travelling in the tracks of an outworn
tradition that spirals downward and inward to
nothingness.

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