EXPOSE YOURSELF to ART Towards a Critical Epistemology of Embarrassment
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EXPOSE YOURSELF TO ART Towards a Critical Epistemology of Embarrassment Gwyneth Siobhan Jones Goldsmiths University of London PhD Thesis 2013 1 I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Gwyneth Siobhan Jones 2 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the negative affect of ‘spectatorial embarrassment’, a feeling of exposure and discomfort sometimes experienced when looking at art. Two particular characteristics of embarrassment figure in the methodology and the outcome of this enquiry; firstly that embarrassment is marginal, of little orthodox value, and secondly, it is a personal experience of aversive self-consciousness. The experiential nature of embarrassment has been adopted throughout as a methodology and the embarrassments analysed are, for the most part, my own and based on ‘true’ experience. Precedent for this is drawn from ‘anecdotal theory’, which uses event and occasion in the origination of a counter-theory that values minor narratives of personal experience in place of the generalising and abstract tendencies of theory-proper. The context is a series of encounters with artworks by Gilbert & George, Jemima Stehli, Franko B, Adrian Howells, and Sarah Lucas. They are connected by their contemporaneity, their ‘British-ness’, and that they allow the spectator no comfortable position to look from. This enquiry engages with theories of ‘the gaze’ (as both aesthetic disinterest and a dubious sign of cultural competence) and the challenge to aesthetic disinterest made by ‘transgressive art’ which may provoke a more engaged, even embodied response. Each encounter sparks consideration of differing causes and outcomes of embarrassment that resonate beyond art to broader sociocultural territories particularly in terms of gender and class. The approach taken is inherently interdisciplinary, situated within the affective turn, and engaging with feminist and queer discourses. Moments of embarrassment as ‘thinking-feeling’ are finally configured as a critical epistemology, or a ‘body of knowledge’ offering the opportunity to value the singular truth of embarrassment as an embodied criticality that is critical of coercive patterns of social ‘okayness’ and belonging. 3 CONTENTS: Abstract: p 3 Introduction: An Introduction to Embarrassment p 5 Chapter 1: In The Gallery: Gilbert & George ‘Major Exhibition’ p 74 at Tate Modern Chapter 2: Interface: On using anecdote and theory to account p 116 for the embarrassment of Jemima Stehli’s Strip Chapter 3: Face to Face: The ethics and the cost of looking p 153 for Franko B Chapter 4: Inside Out: Confessions of sentimentality in the p 184 performance art of Adrian Howells Chapter 5: Singled Out: On being interpellated by indecency p 217 and intimacy in Gilbert & George’s Sodom Chapter 6: Face Value: The discrediting of self-image in p 254 Sarah Lucas’s self-portraiture Chapter 7: Outcome: Towards a critical epistemology of p 293 (Conclusion) embarrassment . Bibliography p 320 4 An Introduction to Embarrassment This project was sparked by a chance encounter with a curious quotation; We wanted to do art to be embarrassed. Art that embarrasses ourselves. I think we still do that. We are very embarrassed sometimes at what we are doing, and that’s a good feeling. When it hurts then its true for us.1 The sentiment expressed by Gilbert & George made me pause, for I too sometimes feel embarrassed by art. As a spectator, I am sometimes embarrassed by an encounter with an image which can hurt, like a punctum, and I find I am drawn to images that have this capacity; images that unsettle, unnerve, that undo my sense of self. I am not speaking of a strong emotional response; of the impact of the sublime, of shock, or disgust, but a more minor affect; an awkwardness, a sense of the inappropriate, accompanied perhaps by a double-take, a look-and-look-away. These small but dysphoric feelings are at odds with accepted notions of aesthetic appreciation, or indeed any kind of appreciation. In what way is this ‘a good feeling’? Gilbert and George’s claim that embarrassment is a productive artistic strategy that they link to creativity (and to love) has prompted me to reconsider embarrassment, both as a spectatorial experience and as a critical device.2 The questions I want to consider are; within the context of spectatorship, how does 1 The comment on embarrassment was originally made to Anthony d’Offay and recalled by Gilbert in ‘London’s Living Sculpture: Interview with Robert Becker 1982’ Gilbert&George, The Words of Gilbert & George (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997). p136. 2 Mark Lawson interviewed G&G in 2011 and asked them to comment on the embarrassment quote, they replied that it is still very relevant to their creative processes: George: ‘The only thing we can compare it with is when one’s deeply attracted to a new person, then everything else is different not just that person, but the house and the garden, and the air, the atmosphere, everything is exalted because of that feeling.’ Gilbert: ‘It is embarrassing, it is difficult . you would like to run away from it.’ George: Its exciting. Gilbert: And it’s exciting because it is that edge, it must be like being on the front no? It is all exciting and nervous making, and at the same time that’s the best thing that you can do. Louise Bourner, "Mark Lawson Talks to Gilbert and George," (BBC, 2011). 5 embarrassment figure as part of the experience of art? And, does this minor and negative feeling tender a possible outcome that is in any way worthwhile? OUTLINING A CONTEXT Despite the current increased interest in emotions of ‘the affective turn’, a growing cultural and critical attention to emotion; what it is, and what it does, embarrassment is underrepresented. It has received some attention from psychological perspectives, notably in the works of Robert J. Edelman (1987), W. Ray Crozier (1990), Michael Lewis (1995), and Rowland S. Miller (1996), but this is much less consideration than other emotions such as grief, shame or anger have received.3 Embarrassment is a minority subject of self-help books that present it as a wholly negative experience that can, with courage, be avoided or overcome.4 For the sociological view of embarrassment, the seminal text is (still) Erving Goffman’s mid twentieth-century essay ‘Embarrassment and Social Organization’ which interprets embarrassment as a temporary failure of self which acts to moderate behaviour, enforcing and reinforcing social norms.5 Two notable texts consider embarrassment within a cultural context; firstly Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks, who argues that Keats’ poetry and private correspondence show evidence of a remarkable sensitivity to embarrassment, and that this is indicative of emotional and indeed moral 3 A search on Amazon for books on single emotions within the category of ‘Society, Politics and Philosophy’ generated the following numbers of published titles: Happiness; 2109, Grief; 2066, Fear; 1550, Anxiety; 912, Pride; 630, Anger; 592, Shame; 386, Envy; 140, Jealousy; 121, Disgust; 48, Embarrassment; 39. 4 Such as; Allyn, D. I Can’t Believe I Just Did That: How Embarrassment Can Wreak Havoc in Your Life – and What You Can Do to Conquer It (2004), and, Markaway, B. G. Carmin, C.N., Pollard, C.A., and Flynn, T. Dying of Embarrassment: Help for Social Anxiety & Phobia (1992) 5 ‘Embarrassment and Social Organization’ in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967). 6 intelligence.6 And in Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Nicholas Ridout theorises embarrassment as the ‘predicament of the audience’; a situation in which the audience is ‘caught looking’ and this is figured as a form of exposure, almost an indecent exposure, that in its difficulty is a cause of both pleasure and pain. But beyond these texts, embarrassment is without a critical discourse. It figures in fiction, but academically has been largely ignored. Ridout notes that embarrassment ‘does not make theoretical claims, but subsists in the empirical.’7 Can there be a theory of embarrassment, or are the two terms quite irreconcilable? Embarrassment as an academic subject is small and self-effacing, it is anxious to be overlooked and complicit in its own marginalisation. In fact, the problem seems to be one of tautology; embarrassment is embarrassing. The lack of interest in embarrassment cannot be fully explained by its negativity; other dysphoric emotions have their discourses. This seems to be particularly the case in queer theory, where there is a rich vein of enquiry into the dynamic between negative affect and critical thinking. In Queer Optimism Michael Snediker discusses this, noting queer theory’s ‘habitation of this pessimistic field’ and proposing that this reflects a concern with ‘ontological instabilities’.8 Queer work of this stripe might include the following writers and texts: Judith Butler cites melancholy as constitutive of gender strategies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick inhabits shame, writing from within on its queer and critical potential and she is followed by others writing on shame as the queer emotion. In No Future, Lee Edelman mines the death drive to think almost unthinkable opposites to futurity. Leo Bersani advocates the potential of self- shattering as a disintegration of self through sexuality, and replicated in art and 6 Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). p1. 7 Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). p84. 8 Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). p4. 7 criticism. Judith Halberstam writes about The Queer Art of Failure which runs counter to what she terms ‘the toxic positivity of contemporary life’ asking instead, what reward does failure offer? Lauren Berlant writes about the disappointment of Cruel Optimism as an endlessly self-defeating desire.