Subjectivity in men's art has, by and large, meant the elaboration of acceptable masculine themes and concerns whilst excluding their emotional and sexual lives. There have, of course, been artists who wanted to excavate primary psychic drives and desires by staging abject displays of bodily functions and extremes of human behaviour (16). However, I am concerned here with those who have explored the personal through the medium of video in an attempt to reinstate the autonomy of individual males, alienated by a patriarchal consumer culture. Many of these have drawn on the feminist initiative of challenging traditional gender formations through the examination of the specific experience and personal history of the individual.
Men, however, do not begin from the same position as women either politically or in terms of representation. Skill, for instance, is the traditional method whereby men establish their mastery, so that extensive demonstrations of virtuosity do little to dent the constructs of conventional masculinity. In terms of representation, male artists start from the centre, not the periphery. Historically, images of men have not robbed them of their social status, their 'tribal' position. For instance, in Gainsborough's portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews, we know that both the landscape and the woman at his side are part of his property. Nowadays, mass media's representations of powerful men portray them in settings appropriate to their status: the cabinet minister behind his desk, the scientist in his laboratory, the academic giving his 'expert' opinion against shelves full of his publications. When a 'personal' moment is represented, the contemporary Mr. Andrews is likewise set in the context of the supportive wife, family and home which his success has brought him. In contrast, representations of professional women are often mitigated by irrelevant investigations into their wardrobes and domestic arrangements.
It is extremely difficult to produce an image of a man which robs him of his social status, of his unimpeachable right to personhood. As Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock have argued: 'A man can be placed in a feminine position, but will not become feminine. Because of the social power of men in our society, no man can ever be reduced to a crumpled heap of male flesh in the dark corner of some woman's studio.' (17) Men have to work hard to produce images that disrupt the social structures that both benefit and constrain them. Not surprisingly, few have considered it to be in their best interest to do so. But it is in the field of video art that some male artists have challenged cultural representations of masculinity and it is in the exploration of the personal that the most radical interventions have been made.
In State of Division (1979) Mick Hartney was prepared to drop the mask of masculinity and explore an 'unmanly' vulnerability, an identity in crisis. As in many a feminist testimony, Mick uses the TV as a confessional box directly addressing the audience. His head is trapped in the box, the classic head and shoulders swaying in and out of frame failing to deliver the newsreader's controlled assessment of world affairs. Instead the artist reveals his agony: 'The audience is waiting for me to do Something to say something so that they can analyse it, Criticize it, take it apart.' It is significant that this tape was made when the artist was relatively young, his career still in the making. Threatened by the constant intrusion of undesirable emotions and uncertainties, the tape can be seen either as an appeal for sympathy or as an attempt to toughen up, to exorcise the disruptive emotional material in the process of becoming a man. This tape was a one-off, Mick Hartney never made another like it. The same is true of Mike Stubbs and Nik Houghton who both made free-flowing, subjective works in their early careers but dismissed them even as they were being made. 'I pick my nose,' says Nik Houghton in Jump the Gun (1985), 'and I lie a great deal.' The threat to the emerging male of his 'feminine' side must be quickly repressed although this process is never entirely successful. Indeed, Jeremy Welsh has identified a tradition of lying in men's videos which can be found in Ian Breakwell's fictitious video diaries or in Dave Critchley's delightful fantasy of the Americas he never visited, the pieces he never did(18).
Jeremy Welsh himself has had fewer difficulties confronting the truths of his own life. In his installation Immemorial (1989) he places himself in his patrilineal relationship looking backwards to his father and forwards to his newly-born son. In contrast to Kate Meynell's sensuous connectedness in Hannah's Song, Welsh's attempts to make contact with the image of his father points to the difficulties and conflicts in the traditional father-son relationship. His father is shown in uniform, framed and distanced in time while he himself is reduced to scrutinizing shadows in an attempt to recall a warmth and a humanity that was perhaps never there. It is only in the images of his own son that the mould is broken. The child is shown exuding infantile sensuality and the father's gaze betrays a deep, unconditional love that he makes no attempt to hide. It suggests that when the child later shifts his identification from mother to father, he will be able to maintain the intimacy and continuity of bonding that so many men lose as they symbolically reject their mothers and enter manhood.
If the male psyche is formed out of separation from the mother and family bonds, then a male artist who defines himself in terms of personal relationships is breaking the patriarchal mould and refusing to pay the price of masculine privilege. In On Being (1985) Chris Meigh-Andrews weaves a gentle tapestry of memories and connections with places, objects and the image of a woman with whom he has bonded. His sense of identity is fluid, shifting,, displaying the kind of negative capability more usually associated with the flexible ego boundaries of women. In a later work Domestic Landscapes (1992-94) the artist presents fragments of landscapes, domestic settings and those semi-natural spaces which link the locations that he has at different times called 'home'. People appear and disappear, relationships are hinted at but never defined. The work speaks of an elusive masculinity which is forever shifting, evolving an image of itself in the places and through the people who become significant for a time. Since this work also exists as an interactive CD-ROM, the sense of mobility, of multiple permutations and connections is pervasive. At no point can one create monuments, nor devise grand narratives, theories or ideologies there are no closures. The identity which is proposed looks no further than its own humanity to establish a working definition of what it might mean to be a man.
Perhaps the most radical betrayal of conventional masculinity comes from the work of gay video-makers who have similarly adopted an investigation of the personal as a political methodology. Stuart Marshall devoted his lifetime's work to formulating, a definition of masculinity that denies heterosexual configurations and insists on the personal and political rights enjoyed by the 'straight' community. Although much of his work investigated the structures of language and representation, Robert Marshall 1912-1961 (1991) was the record of a personal journey in search of the father he barely knew. As Stuart's own death approaches and we witness the various remedies that fail to cure him, he retraces his father's footsteps and takes us to the place where he died. The use of subjective, hand-held camera draws us into Stuart's investigations of his elusive relationship with his father. As in much feminist work the principal identification is between parent and child of the same sex and the classical shift to the 'correct' identification is denied. Robert Marshall can also be located within the wider political framework of AIDS and the struggle against institutionalised homophobia. But it is the work's 'unmanly' preoccupation with loss of the father, and loss of life itself which makes it a disturbing indictment of traditional masculinity. We become aware of how denial, separation, and the suppression of emotional truth underlies the pain of that familiar reproach that 'big boys don't cry'.
Other video makers have explored the complexities of their sexual identities through an investigation of formative relationships. David Larcher, for example, made a lingering video portrait of his grandmother, while Michael Maziere has explored the image of his mother as a young woman in photographs and on video tape(19). One of the most poignant evocations of personal relationships is Neil Bartlett's That's How Strong My Love Is (1989). Using a direct narrative address to the viewer, the artist speaks of his relationships with his father, lover and friends, all of whom appear in the work. Like Jayne Parker's mother, they give their image as a gift of affection to the artist. Sitting quietly at his son's side, Bartlett's father listens to a simple declaration of love and responds at the end by silently taking the artist's hand. In speaking his love, Bartlett insists on a relationship to the father that mirrors the deep physical and emotional bond more usually associated with maternal identification. His adult masculinity thus incorporates the emotional richness that he should more properly have abandoned to achieve the separateness and autonomy of heterosexual masculinity. The artist remains connected but not in the configuration sanctioned by patriarchal law. He interrupts the Freudian process whereby his emotional needs would be stifled in a male world but satisfied in the privacy of an exclusive heterosexual union. Instead he goes beyond the camaraderie of conventional male bonding and reinvests his relationships with deviant' love and desire and nominates his father as the source and inspiration of the complex interconnected adult he has become.
A more confrontational approach to masculine sexualities is adopted by Michael Curran who performs a 'dangerous' sexual act in his recent tape Amami se Vuoi (1994). A young man is stretched out across the screen, naked. Another approaches, bends over the first and begins to spit into his lover's open mouth. The naked boy strains to receive these liquid gifts in an agony of desire. His willingness to submit to what might be interpreted as a form of abuse reflects on the narrow definitions of eroticism the heterosexual norm dictates, while the brutal frontality of the performance contrasts starkly with the rose-tinted, soft-focus depictions of romantic love in the mainstream media (20).
Male artists concerned with homosexuality represent the 'purest' adaptation of the feminist assertion that the personal is political. It is indeed the choice of sexual partner - the most private aspect of their lives - that is responsible for the prejudice and discrimination from which they suffer. The public declaration of their sexuality, their 'coming out' is a political act of defiance. But homosexuality can easily be marginalised, incorporated into the rich tapestry of variations that so ably confirm the centrality of the heterosexual norm. It is much harder to diffuse the disruptive power of a heterosexual male who will not conform to emotional type. If those in power embrace the personal as a valid and valued aspect of their lives, then those who are traditionally defined by the personal might themselves become empowered. But male video artists working with the personal are still in the minority. They tend to act as individuals, lacking any sustained political organisation and the context of a widespread consensus of purpose which exists in both feminism and gay politics. Artists like the American video-maker Bill Viola may appear to be dealing with personal issues - the birth of his child, the death of his mother- but he does so within the framework of an art market which elevates him to the status of individual male genius of the video screen. He is seen to be operating alone, dealing in generalities, and the one-to-one of feminist art politics is replaced by a poetic introspection apparently divorced from the culture and the masculinity that generated it. However, it is possible to identify a greater willingness among younger video artists like Michael Curran to explore their subjectivities and redefine the parameters of a masculinity which offers them power at the cost of their emotional and psychic well-being. But it will require a greater awareness of how and at whose expense that power is granted for any significant social and cultural changes to arise from the politicisation of the personal in men's video art.
Whilst our main source of cultural imagery continues to be provided by mass media and the commercial interests that fund it, representation will remain one of the key issues of cultural politics - what is present or absent from the visual culture will determine our understanding of ourselves and condition our expectations and aspirations. It is at the level of representation then that models of femininity and masculinity find their power. The insistence on the personal, on difference and diversity in art, produces representations which help to counter-balance the media mythologies we continue to accept as reality.
By virtue of its immediacy, ease of use and its ability to be reproduced and transmitted, video remains a potent medium for unleashing the power of the personal in art. Video allows artists to reconstitute the individual using speech, gesture, fantasy and all the time that it takes for the whole person to emerge. The unity of the individual resists the dominant media's tendency to atomise and compartmentalise the audience into consumer groups consisting in fact of isolated individuals plugged into their television sets or computer terminals in search of a fictional sense of community and connectedness. Video can be used to represent the individual as part of a network of actual interpersonal relationships from which his/her identity is built. These individuals make up a group, a class or gender within a recognisable social and political reality. The central position of the individual in a work based on the personal as political speaks directly to other autonomous beings and offers them a value in relation to the work which invites reply. The aggregation of these works paints a broad picture from which political initiatives might concretise. These then produce a new generation of images and personal testaments against which political theories can be tested and the whole process starts again.
Notes
16. Here I would include the work of the Viennese Aktionists, a
group of performance artists operating in the 1960s who specialised in
ritualistic events that included self-mutilation and the disemboweling of
animals whose guts were then used to degrade naked individuals, often
women. This was designed to produce a cathartic experience for the
audience which would cleanse them of their bourgeois conditioning.
17. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock Old Mistresses: Women,
Art and Ideology (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1981)
18. Jeremy Welsh made these observations in a conversation with
the author in 1989. David Critchley's Pieces' is a work called Pieces
I Never Did (1979).
19. David Larcher's video portrait is called Granny's Is
(1989). Michael Maziere's photographic work is called Mother Desire,
while the video work is still in progress.
20. Curran's work has been identified as part of a new wave of
performance-oriented video which take its influence from artists such as
Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and William Wegman, all active in the early
1970s. However, I would suggest that in spite of certain formal
similarities, Acconci's aggressive confrontations with the audience have
little in common with the personal, anguished eroticism of Curran's work.
Copyright © : Catherine Elwes,1996
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5,1997