undercurrent

February 22, 2004

Shoes and Sex

Although I'm by no means an expert, I find myself demurring from the official line on Helmut Newton, after reading the recent eulogy and comments. Of course, k-p is backed up on this by Ballard and Sinclair, so I haven't a chance, but still...

The Newtonian's commentators applaud him for the foray into 'desire as pain', desire as 'profoundly unnatural'. With no, or only tacit, reference to the fact that the pain and discomfort is entirely with one party, whilst the desire is with the other; in short, the gazed-at subject (or more properly, object) exists for the fulfillment of the desire of the looking subject, or, let's be frank, the looking man: "Newton treated women like objects, obviously. Yet his logic is pursued to such a point of perversity that it would be churlish and gauche to impose obsolete sexual political moralisms onto his work, in part because in really treating women as objects, he desubjectifies them to the extent that these 'physically striking women positioned in such a way that they are divorced from the bodies they display with such flagrant interest' are no longer sexual."

The apologia is a bit of sophistry really. If I'm being churlish and gauche, well OK it's not the first time, but what sense does this make?

It's alright, as an intellectual-visual game, to treat women like objects, if in doing so they cease to be sexual. Doesn't this mean the following: the power game that consists in the woman's bondage and mutilation for and by the watching man, has not only gone so far that the woman need only be present in telegraphic, in flat, reproduced form, but that the mastery implicit in the act now flings off the disguise of sexual desire, and reveals itself for a pure delight in abstracted cruelty? That the eye is no longer a metonymic penis but is now sovereign in its own right...That the only quality the female was allowed to have, something she was wanted for that could briefly take their relationship beyond the sterile, loveless gaze, beyond her desperate waxing and waning attraction/fidelity to The Model and his specular enjoyment of himself : this one hope of intimacy or communication (which she has been thoroughly trained to rely on as her only currency) has now been revoked, leaving her as a cipher, nothing left but the detached, staring eye.

Has Newton taught us something here? Isn't it clear to anyone who cares to step back for a moment from these traditional ritualised signifying practices of desire - the lipstick, the haughty gazes, the high heels, the hard bodies - that glamour is a power game, a ridiculous one at that, and one in which women are inevitably the losers, for they are brought up from early childhood to see that their appearance, their garnering attention through ritualised behaviours such as flirting, eyelash fluttering, feyness and yielding to male expertise, are the only (or best) tools they have to work with. Even those who manage to break out of this web, or those who somehow can't manage to keep up the mask, will find it's a tough, unrelenting battle - to explain why they're not behaving properly, to fake it when necessary, to be refused entrance into all culturally-prescribed roles and live as an alien unless they get into character. To this, so far, nothing is added, indeed one might say that Newton doesn't even get this far.

I went out with Ruth trying to buy some shoes recently. I took for a mild exaggeration her complaints that it was impossible to find decent shoes for women: but incredibly, a shop assistant literally confirmed her suspicion that there are no shoes suitable for walking. 'No, sorry, we haven't got anything like that at the moment'. Hundreds of pairs of shoes. None for walking. Just pause to relish the disgraceful absurdity of this. For those who like to think that in the 21st Century all is enlightened and rational, girlpower and freedom is all around, and all gauche politicising is obsolete, take another look. (Of course, they have trainers - trainers, the great marketing triumph of the 90s, and the reason why a generation of kids will grow up not only obese and hyperactive but also lame...sorry, wrong rant.)

Surrealist Meret Oppenheim (whose most famous work is the fur-covered teacup Dejeuner en Furrure;) created a disquieting object in her sculpture My Nurse;(above). The sculpture consists of a pair of high-heeled shoes arranged on a silver platter and adorned, like a piece of meat, with crowns of paper. Some have interpreted it merely as a vulgar symbol of female sexuality (Oppenheim herself only went so far as to say it was a 'revenge' on her nurse). But a far richer interpretation, and one that takes in all the associations of the object, is made in an article by Maureen P. Sherlock in a book on 'outsider art'. Sherlock creates for the reader an imagined 'installation,' an affecting assemblage of Oppenheim's My Nurse; and Luce Irigaray's text One does not stir without the other;. The text opens up the powerful ramifications of the object Oppenheim created. It is an uncomfortable poetic identification and evocation of a repressive complex revolving around food, domesticity and domestic bondage, motherhood and muteness, a lament for the woman caged by wife- and motherhood in eternal domesticity, the impossibility of communication between mother and daughter, and the hereditary recapitulation of this impossibility:

"You've gone again. Once more you're assimilated into nourishment. We've again disappeared into this act of eating each other. Hardly do I glimpse you and walk towards you, when you metamorphose into a baby nurse...
I want no more of this stuffed, sealed up, immobilized body...I'll turn to my father, I'll leave you for someone who seems more alive than you. For someone who doesn't prepare anything for me to eat. For someone who leaves me empty of him, mouth gaping on his truth.

"And the one doesn't stir without the other. But we do not move together. When the one of us comes into the world, the other goes underground. And what I wanted from you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive.;

In Oppenheim's piece the visual (sculptural) image functions to set off a complex of ideas that bring to the surface emotionally powerful structural relations between apparently disconnected phenomena (a good definition of surrealism). In an oblique, subtle way, the piece functions to call attention to a logic of desire and repression, a pandora's box which once opened, one can never again fully consign to unconsciousness, or be unaware of in one's own life.

<img alt="groom.jpg" src="http://www.urbanomic.com/MT/undercurrent/archives/groom.jpg" width="297" height="236" border="0" />

In Paula Rego's images, what you might think you see (if you're male) at first are sexually provocative, impish young women and girls. When you look closer, you realise that Rego's world is one in which women have the same relation to their childhood, and their bodies, as men (in fact in one series, above, women become dogs in order to allow them this privilege). Men are allowed, encouraged, indulged in their 'boyish' ways, their pathetic fantasies, their toys, their oafishness and selfish disarray, girls are taught to become women. And once they're women, there's no way back. They must sit a certain way, they must act a certain way, they must follow the most elaborate convolutions if they are not to stand out as freaks. Rego's women are freaks. They sit with their legs open, on the floor, absorbed in play or work, just as Rego paints sitting on the floor surrounded by her childhood objects. They're freaks, their faces are characterful, they have physical presence and weight, in short, they are people. And looking into this alternate world fills one with a most leaden, stomach-churning despondency and shame, because you realise how far away, how impossible, this world is.

Have you seen a young female child being socialised? It's the most painful, the most heart-rending, disgusting process. The breaking of an animal. The twisted bones are only the physical signs of the repugnant deformation required by the socius. But nevertheless since they have been 'celebrated' let's talk about them:

'The foot in heels : Newton takes an almost medical interest in the savage twisting of bone.'

The trouble is, of course, that no-one does take any medical interest in this. Unlike the realms of obstetrics and gynaecology, where there are legions of white-coated experts ready to stick the scalpel in, pump the hypodermic, and generally arrogate to themselves what little power women have over their own bodies, there are few doctors in the world who are interested in talking about the adverse effects of make-up, high heels, fad diets, and all the other addictive-desiring-technologies that women are subjected to. This could be because those doctors all benefit financially from the pharmaceutical/cosmetic/medical business-behemoth. Not that this is Newton's fault of course, but, and here is the nub, in what sense does his work tell us something new, or create any significant shift in our perception of this everyday, acceptable mutilation? I have offered two cases which, for me at least, offer powerful critiques of power and womanhood. I want to ask what critique Newton offers.

Newton has nothing like Rego's world to show us. I don't hold anyone under an obligation to be 'positive', but to my mind his work is simply a distorted mirror on the ugliness of the actual, and it's the lack of challenge rather than the ugliness that offends. Worse than this, by presuming to say (if he himself does say so, I don't know) that he is exaggerating or using satire, he necessarily undermines the extremity of the actual situation, that is, the cruelty constitutive of the socius.

'Newton doesn't doubt for a moment that eroticism is profoundly unnatural. Bodies acquire what charge they have only from becoming elegantly contorted into the most excruciating postures.'

Surely only the assumption of an aesthete bachelor-pad audience could excuse this being blithely offered up merely as a truism. Because once again wouldn't the erotic charge be dispersed somewhat if one had the courage to go beyond one's cultural training, to empathise, to treat the elegantly contorted object as a person? To doubt for a moment...this is precisely what an artist (and a critic) should offer us. A way out of the world, not a confirmation of it. Changing us, not offering us cheeky, smug glimpses at how naughty we are. Trapdoors to alternative universes, not peepholes into convention.

To take a different tack, let's look at this functionally, I wonder what percentage of the owners of Newton's work in its various reproduced forms have the same thoughts as k-P (or ballard or sinclair) about it. I suspect not the majority. I wonder how less-than-perfect 14-year old girls feel about it. Empowered and confident about sexuality, I somehow doubt it. Obviously it's easy (for some) to totally disregard this naïve critique, though: so if we do, then the claim remains that by pushing the norms of customary eroticism 'to the limit', Newton somehow effects, not a release from them, but some kind of a difference in our relation to them. He makes a difference, must surely be the claim of the Newtonian. Let's say, he makes us realise how unnatural our appetites are.

To be sure, exaggeration is a part of satire. And there's no obligation to offer a haranguing explication after the gags. Just think of an excellent satire like Chris Morris' Brasseye, for example; it's for the most part deadpan, in many places indistinguishable from that which it satirises. Of course there are signs, it's these little signs that make us laugh, that just go a tiny, perfectly-judged iota too far and signal satire to us (some people's addled brains can't pick up these signals, of course, nick, but that's another story). Presumably, the Newtonian would maintain that the walking stick, the medical scaffold, etc. fulfill this very function: they let us know that we are in Lilliput or Erewhon: that the real world has been transcended and is being parodied.

But the difference is of course, behind the scenes of the performance, in the workings of the thing, the creation of the work : Chris Morris didn't have actual paedophiles raping actual children on Brasseye. The 'acting out' was just that, an acting-out for the purpose of satire. There were those that complained, rather implausibly, that joking about such things would somehow exacerbate the issue. But most sane people would not have difficulty accepting it as satire. The situation is different with Newton and photography, since unless he makes some innovative gesture he is trapped within the world he supposedly seeks to critique. It's the same delusion as an advertising executive saying 'yeah I'm only doing it as a pisstake, really I hate it all and want to smash the state'. Newton in fact never makes such a move. He never gets beyond the specular. In no sense can he be said to be merely 'acting out' the role of purveyor of objectifying images, any more than Kylie, no matter how ironic she likes to think she is, can be said to be merely 'acting out' the role of objectifying trivialising image of womanhood (in what would the 'mereness' consist?). And so neither of these is able to offer any effective critique.

The idea of satire, exaggeration and irony loops back nicely to Irigaray: her method for interrogating the heroes of philosophy was mimesis;: taking the voice of the 'enemy', slowly and carefully explicating the content of what he was saying, the hidden assumptions and structures of power behind it (in effect a form of deconstruction, although I don't think the connection helps Irigaray, nor does her robust questioning need any of deconstruction's intellectual bullshit). The important thing is that Irigaray makes the enemy say what he didn't want to say, what he hoped to keep hidden behind clever conceits; that which, so long as it remained hidden, would keep him in control, would keep the game playing by his rules.

In Newton there is nothing of this: his 'satire' fails to make anything happen or stop happening, it doesn't break anything open, doesn't cause anything to be said that wasn't before, in fact it reinforces the mute encapsulation of the image-cipher. It is a quiet place, the planet of shaven, crippled, plastic aryans. The cruelty of the image doesn't make us say 'stop,' it invites us to say 'more'.

Posted by robin at February 22, 2004 02:15 AM