Elwes
: Part 3
A further distinction between the personal as political and television representation can be identified in Mona Hatoum's Measures of Distance (1988) which focuses on her relationship to her mother. Photographs of the middle-aged Mrs Hatoum in the shower are overlaid with Lebanese writing, letters written to Mona throughout turbulent period in her country's history. The artist reads the letters in English as a voice-over, never once interrupting to comment or interpret the text for us. We hear of Mona's father whose wishes her mother defied in sending her daughter intimate images of the body he presumably considers to be his property. The familial conflict is located in the wider political realities of a war which is raging all around her as she writes. All this is described through the mother's subjective account and we never lose the sense of relationship, of connectedness between mother and daughter. Within a documentary format Mona's mother would never have been allowed to speak uninterrupted for so long. Instead we would have had fragmented interviews with mother, father, daughter and other satellite characters. The power of the testaments would have been lost in the resulting mosaic of speech and we would have had trouble remembering who was who. More likely we would have absorbed the undeclared prejudices of the programme-maker(s), whose relationship to the subject would remain obscure. But by knowing who Mona is in relation to her subject we are left to reflect on our own maternal relationships and the oppressive social definitions of femininity that so often cause a rift where sustenance and creative energy once flowed.
This insistence on relationship, on the artist's lived experience as daughter of /or mother to a specified individual, offered a solution to a problem which dogged both artist and theoretician in the early days of feminist art. Film theory had not only presented the viewer's position as fundamentally male, but the eye of the camera the objectifying gaze of the lens was also deemed to be masculine. According to this analysis, the camera assumed the subjectivity of the white, middle-class heterosexual man while women and other 'minority' groups who appeared acted an 'other' to the central male subject. Many women film-makers attempted to 'castrate' the implied male gaze by looking back into the camera and so denying the viewer the cloak of invisibility behind which he could voyeuristically consume the image without himself being observed. An example of this technique appears in Louise Forshaw's video tape Hammer and Knife (1987). The artist stands in a field and addresses the male viewer: 'Because of you I've learnt a martial art. You sit opposite me on trains and try to make polite conversation and when I answer, you think I want to fuck.' Louise's diatribe and her unflinching gaze shift the focus of the work from female victim to male aggressor and her refusal to pose, pout or in any way fulfil male expectations inhibits the usual process of objectification which, as John Shotter asserts above, prevents the woman in view from continuing to be a person.
Other artists, notably film-makers, solved the problem of objectification by simply moving out of the camera's field of vision. Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Lis Rhodes and Tamara Krikorian are examples of artists who found alternative means of establishing their presence and their authorship. They used metaphor, reflection and deflection, psychoanalytic and linguistic theory and, in the case of Susan Hiller, the abstraction of the body into landscape. But many video-makers continued to pursue the notion of the personal as a strategy for combatting the processes of objectification embedded in the structures of representation.
The return to the maternal relationship was widespread. Sometimes a fusion of identities would occur as in Breda Beban and Hvorje Horvatic's All Her Secrets Contained in an Image (1987). This moving depiction of loss and retrieval, situates the artist in the role of daughter dolorosa. She stands before the camera, her face streaked with tears as her mother approaches wrapped in a heavy coat against the ravages of a winter landscape. We soon realise that Breda's mother is not there. She is a back-projection against which the artist weeps. Not only is the mother absent as flesh, but she is herself a filmic image of the daughter dressed in her mother's clothes. The maternal image is thus internalized and the continuity of the maternal inheritance is reinforced displacing the male referent, the 'third term' in the family configuration. In this work the viewer is positioned not so much as voyeur but as a witness to an event, to a lived relationship. This becomes information with which s/he may re-interpret her/his own identity within the social relations of the family.
The video artist as an internalization or a reincarnation of the mother offers one interpretation of the personal. The artist as mother takes the matrilineal line forward into the next generation as she explores her relationship with a child of her own body. Here we see a now familiar attempt to block conventional voyeuristic reponses but this time by substituting adult heterosexual formations with the oceanic delights of the polymorphous and perverse eroticism of infancy. Kate Meynell's work with her daughter Hannah Morgan speaks of the overwhelming emotional and sensual experience that is motherhood. French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray characterizes touch as a major element in the erotic life of a woman, and in Hannah's Song (1986) the ecstatic sensuality of the infant girl teases out her mother's pleasure as she responds to the maternal hands. In grainy black and white, the child eagerly reaches for her mother's touch and together they perform a dance of daily ablutions returning us to pre-linguistic bonding broken only by the introduction of colour and by the child now rising to meet her own image in a mirror. But the disruption of the mirror phase does not destroy the physical links between mother and daughter and the baby continues to satisfy her mother's appetite for touching, for non-penetrative physical contact. Hannah is both the object of her mother's gaze and a mirror to Kate's own sensuality. Here again the identification from mother to daughter is uninterrupted by phallic symbolization and reiterates the primary matrixial relationship. In the same way that women's pleasure might constitute the other as herself, as the sexual organ that Luce Irigaray describes as retouching itself, indefinitely (9), Kate and Hannah symbolically fuse in a union that knows no boundaries. They are other to each other and as one. Without the centralizing, defining power of the phallus, they are free to reinvent themselves and embark on vertiginous journeys whilst remaining 'the source, the locus for the other'(10).
The denial of conventional eroticism and a return to the perversity of infantile sensuality takes on another dimension if the child in question is male. Between 1983 and 1990 I made a number of works with my son Bruno Muellbauer. Every male child was once not culturally male but an extension of the maternal body and unable to differentiate between his own desires and the source of their gratification. Within this configuration the adult power relations between male and female are reversed and that experience underpins adult fascination with murderesses, witches, seductresses and all other women of power including politicians. My work during this period recreates the oceanic, symbiotic union of the male child with the maternal object, not as symbolic ogress, but as a living and relatively normal individual. In Myth (1984) the mother's breast returns to its original function as a source of food, thus subverting its narrow adult reading as object of heterosexual desire. A single breast fills the screen and is repeatedly pummelled by the infant's hand. These brutal caresses soon produce the desired effect and milk oozes from the swollen nipple. The viewer, deprived of any conventionally sexual reading, is left to confront or repress pre-lingual memories of the physical and psychological pleasures of lactation. These arise with the concomitant anxieties attached to the presence and absence, to the potential loss of what was to the infant self a monumental, but at times unstable source of comfort and sustenance.
The social implications of lactation were more directly tackled by Shirley Cameron who, in a series of performances in the mid-1970s, breastfed her twin daughters whilst sitting in a cage located in public places. She was drawing attention to the fact that nowhere in popular culture was the breast bared for anything other than the gratification of male desire although its actual uses may have been highly diverse. Shirley Cameron was also commenting on the fact that breast feeding is actively discouraged in public places. From where I am writing in Oxford, the Museum of Modern Art's cafe is the only place I know of where a mother can feed her child in peace. Shirley's performances were in direct defiance of the social taboo that denies a deeply subversive function of the breast, a most personal of acts which can only be made public when performed by animals in a zoo.
If Myth and Kate Meynell's Hannah's Song were concerned with tactility, with the smells and sensations of those early maternal encounters, the maternal voice and the pre-lingual utterances of the Child also feature in many women's work. Jean Fisher has argued that women's voices resonate with pre-oedipal desire for the maternal (11). Artists like Tina Keane, Alanna O'Kelly and recently, Lucy Benning have used women's voices not only to recover the creative energy of that archaic bond but also to create a metaphor for 'women's entrapment in, and struggles against, dominant narrative closure' (12). In Horses (1994) Lucy Benning records women who can imitate horses. The result is both comical and profoundly disturbing as we struggle to bring together the spectacle of a gendered female with the bodily eruptions and grunts that return us to her physical presence. In this context sound is not, as Jean Fisher puts it, 'the carrier of a message'. Instead it allows 'the power of the voice and body to act beyond its subjugation to articulated speech' (13). Benning's final subject is so overwhelmed by the power of her own ululations that she ends each display with an apologetic giggle.
The emphasis on the maternal body, on pre-lingual utterances and primal configurations of desire and identification might appear to constitute a return to a biological determinism which, in the past, has justified the cultural and economic oppression of women. However, these are not formless primal outpourings that deny the existence of the female intellect. The best works are also demonstrations of consummate technical and formal skill. Sally Potter has observed that traditionally "'femininity" demands the appearance of lack of skill and emphasises nurturance'(14). Since the works I have discussed do nothing to conceal their artistry and yet are clearly by and about women, they cannot be explained away as the amateur ravings of feminine hysteria, speaking from the turbulence of the womb rather than from the clarity of rational thought. Female skill both behind and in front of the camera helps to prevent the marginalisation of women's art into a feminist ghetto, and an engagement with the thorny structures of representation establishes women's formal initiatives at the centre of culture rather than on the periphery.
Technical skill is also one way of undermining content which might
reinforce stereotypical views of women. As Sally Potter has observed of
traditional forms of performance:
The ballerina's physical strength and energy which is communicated
despite the scenario; ... the singer who communicates through the very
timbre of her voice a life of struggle that transforms the banality of her
lyrics into an expression of contradiction. All these can work against the
pessimism of female 'absence' and also suggest a new way of looking at
skill and its subversive potential(15).
If we extend this argument to include performance to and with cameras, then women's work in video while similarly emphasising supposedly uncharacteristic demonstrations of formal skills extends their subversive potential by allying them to personal content which has hitherto been denied a place in the dominant culture. In this way the monopoly of male subjectivity in art is challenged, while at a political level the skillful evocation of the personal goes a long way to establishing the validity of women's experience and their right to the status of personhood.
Notes
9. See Luce Irigaray, 'This Sex Which is Not One' in Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.) New French Feminisms(Brighton,
The Harvester Press, 1981) pp. 99-106.
10. Ibid.
11. Jean Fisher 'Reflections on Echo - sound by women artists in
Britain' in Chrissie Iles (ed.) Signs of the Times catalogue
(Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, 1990) pp. 60-67.
12. Ibid, p.63.
13. Ibid p.64.
14. Sally Potter op.cit.unpaginated.
15. Ibid.
Copyright © : Catherine Elwes,1996
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5, November 1997