1

Helen McGhie

AN-OTHER: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

By

Helen McGhie

Words: 8,837 [email protected] MA Photography 2013

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CAST

(In order of appearance)

SELF...... PROTAGONIST JUDITH BUTLER...... PHILOSOPHER VICTOR BURGIN...... ARTIST, WRITER SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR...... FEMINIST JOAN RIVIERE...... PSYCHOANALYST VALIE EXPORT...... ARTIST LAURA MULVEY...... FEMINIST FILM THEORIST ELIZABETH WILSON...... GEOGRAPHER MARC AUGÉ...... ANTHROPOLOGIST GRISELDA POLLOCK...... ART HISTORIAN SOPHY RICKETT...... ARTIST STEPHEN BARBER...... WRITER JOHN BERGER...... ART CRITIC LUCE IRIGARAY...... FRENCH FEMINIST ERVING GOFFMAN...... SOCIOLOGIST DOROTHY BOHM...... PHOTOGRAPHER CHRISTINE ROSS...... ART HISTORIAN PIPILOTTI RIST...... ARTIST JUDITH WILLIAMSON...... ACADEMIC, WRITER JACQUES LACAN...... PSYCHOANALYST SUSAN SONTAG...... ACADEMIC, WRITER GILLIAN ROSE...... GEOGRAPHER MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES...... ARTIST RUT BLEES LUXEMBURG...... ARTIST NINA POWER...... ACADEMIC, WRITER STEVE PILE...... ACADEMIC, WRITER JANE RENDELL...... ACADEMIC, WRITER CAREY YOUNG...... ARTIST HÉLÈNE CIXOUS...... FRENCH FEMINIST VNS MATRIX...... FEMINIST ARTIST COLLECTIVE AMELIA JONES...... ART HISTORIAN BRACHA L. ETTINGER...... ARTIST, PSYCHOANALYST KEN MILLER...... CURATOR, WRITER UTA BARTH...... ARTIST SUSAN SILTON...... ARTIST

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PROGRAM

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... p 4

INTRO...... p 6

ACT ONE: PERFORMING IN THE METROPOLIS...... p 7

ACT TWO: RESISTANT IMAGES...... p 19

INTERMISSION...... p 34

ACT THREE: THE MATRIXIAL AS AN-OTHER...... p 35

EPILOGUE: [ART]WORKING-AS-LANGUAGE...... p 46

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... P 50

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1: Postcard, A Lancashire Lass in Clogs and Shawl being "Escorted" through Palace Yard, 1907.

Fig. 2: VALIE EXPORT, Tapp und Tastkino, 1968.

Fig. 3: VALIE EXPORT, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, 1969.

Fig. 4: VALIE EXPORT, Zurundung, 1982.

Fig. 5: Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, 1490.

Fig. 6: Sophy Rickett, Pissing Women, 1995.

Fig. 7: Chanel No. 5 advert, 2009.

Fig. 8: Dorothy Bohm, Poster, Venice, 1987.

Fig. 9 & 10: Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade, 2000.

Fig. 11: Anonymous author, date unknown.

Fig. 12 & 13: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, 1973.

Fig. 14: Rut Blees Luxemburg, A Girl from Elsewhere, 2000.

Fig. 15: Carey Young, Body Techniques (after A Line in Ireland, Richard Long, 1974) , 2007.

Fig. 16: Carey Young, Body Techniques (after Circles, Ulrich Ruckreim, 1971), 2007.

Fig. 17: VNS Matrix, Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, 1991.

Fig. 18: Bracha L. Ettinger, Woman-Other-Thing, no. 12, 1990-1993.

Fig. 19: Bracha L. Ettinger, Expanded Symbolic, 2006.

Fig. 20: Uta Barth, Field #9, 1995.

Fig. 21: Susan Silton, Screenshot from Hemidemisemiquaver, 2000.

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Fig. 1

6

INTRO1

SELF "Good evening ladies and gentlemen, thank you kindly for coming to watch my performance. Tonight's show is not the traditional story you're used to. It is very special production with a real twist at the end, as you will see."

It's 2013 in the city of London. Carefully positioned, the props on stage include crinkled newspapers, branded coffee cups and a skyline emphasising the Houses of Parliament. There is a certain seriousness about the atmosphere; smoke and grey light. Gazing at the signifiers, the audience can see patriarchy on stage. Here, in the early twentieth century, brave Suffragettes protested on the streets for their rights; inventive feminists have since continued to momentarily demolish its architecture of power.

Identity is constructed in a similar way to the city, with the structures of patriarchy and psychoanalytic discourse traditionally positioning woman as society's 'other'. This essay's first two Acts will consider the existing structures in which gender identity is culturally formed and maintained; through both an everyday performance and by comparing appearance to the image. I will then consider the Matrix as a new act of identity construction; a feminine psychoanalytic theory that contests the constructed ideals of phallocentrism.

It's time to deconstruct structure, time to celebrate innovative discourses and political artwork; to listen to the voices of radical creativity in order to imagine a environment beyond the confines of existing situations. Though an re-imagining, a re-organisation of existing signifiers via the non-rational properties of art making, there can be possibilities for a cultural set change.

1 Like the city, the prose of a script is constructed. Existing as a 'built' document that determines theme, role- play and setting, a script offers the exciting possibility for new ideas and limitless imagination.

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FADE IN:

ACT ONE: PERFORMING IN THE METROPOLIS

HIS WORLD OF CULTURE IS EPITOMISED AS THE CITY. HIGH-RISE OFFICE BUILDINGS ARE THE STRUCTURAL ICONS THAT DEFINE A PLACE WHILST ROADS, FOOTPATHS AND SIGNS CONTROL MOVEMENT. MATERIALS CONSTRUCT A SOLID PHYSICAL IDENTITY; CONCRETE.

JUDITH BUTLER "Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an "act," as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where "performative" suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning"2

VICTOR BURGIN “The most important question asked of any of us is a question which, at the time it is asked, we do not understand: ‘Doctor, is it a boy or a girl?’ – the answer to that question will determine the general form of the demands society will make of us.”3

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler draws upon the writings of theorists including Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault to powerfully consider gender as a social performance structured and upheld within the confines of patriarchy. As a feminist, Butler places particular emphasis upon dissecting the representation of women within Western structures. She defines the recognised model of femininity4 as problematic by exploring gender's various descriptive models in discourse, psychoanalysis and through a governed set of prohibitive subject rules. If gender is 'culturally constructed' (most notably by the pressures of conforming to ideals in Western advertising; women appear slim, unblemished and happy) then whilst these recognised images in patriarchal society have rigidly determined the ideal aim for physical appearance in women, radical conceptual art has taught us there are opportunities for femininity (or gender as a whole) to be visually transformed by a different set of signifying codes. Butler's

2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 1990), p 190. 3 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), p 41. 4 I will use the terms 'femininity', 'female', 'woman', 'women' interchangeably for the purpose of creative writing to refer to the female gender, women artists and feminists. I realise that there is a debate with regard to this terminology putting an emphasis on 'cisgendered' women (excluding 'transgendered' women), but these ideas are not central to my discussion. 8 argument emphasises how only by witnessing subversive gender acts (such as a man in drag5), one can recognise how the constructed attributes of gender can be revealed as a set of strict signifying codes, distinguishable from a subject’s biological sex, for “[...] gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex."6 In referring to Simone De Beauvoir's famous claim that "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman."7, Butler suggests there is potential for an alternative identity:

JUDITH BUTLER "[...] woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a construction that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. [...] it is open to intervention and signification."8

Gender Trouble was written in 1990. Whilst inspired, I wonder if it may simply serve as an illuminative text highlighting the problems of sex, constructed identity and culture without a wider consideration for interrupting other elements, such as the regulative environments where identity is performed. The 'theatrical stage' is a raised space for an actor to perform in front of an audience, often round or rectangular in shape, it has parameters, edges and borders. A 'stage' can refer to the levels in a building or structure (a recognised aspect of high rise city architecture) and is also "a point, period, or step in a process or development"9, thus it alludes not only to the ideas of design and physical confinement, but can present possibilities for progress in a situation. Throughout this essay, the structures of patriarchal discourse will therefore be imagined as a constructed stage set, organised to reflect the city centre. It is imperative we must deconstruct this organised environment, how it rules the flow of movement and how individuals act and are positioned in culture.

The metropolis is the central environment for male-discourse, the system thrives and capitalism takes over. If woman is definable in terms of difference; as 'other' or as negative (as the male masters of psychoanalysis suggest), then how does this visually translate within

5 see Butler, Gender Trouble, p 186-9. 6 Butler, Gender Trouble, p 8. 7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p 293. 8 Butler, Gender Trouble, p 45. 9 http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/stage?q=stage (accessed 12 September 2013). 9 the landscaped order of the city centre? In London, a 2013 study highlighted that women earn 23% less than men10; in a working capacity many women existing on the edges of businesses, the fringes of the urban working environment (consider the high number of stereotypically female office receptionists or personal assistants). Butler informs us that the recognised 'act' of gender is considered as a practice with similarities to an actor's repetitive rehearsal of a theatrical role11, therefore in order for a woman to escape the structured signifiers of her prescribed identity, she must relinquish her act by designing and adopting an alternate, resistant character.

FLASHBACK:

Psychoanalyst Joan Riviere investigated the 'masquerade' by considering the function of 'womanliness' as a non-threatening, over-exaggerated act to purposely repress possible masculine identity attributes; a before-Butler definition of the physical signifiers that maintain difference. She suggests that characteristics of exaggerated womanliness are "[...] assumed and worn as a mask"12 when a female needs to publically adhere to society's male supremacy by averting male anxieties, for example, when capable women suppress technical knowledge of how to complete culturally 'masculine' jobs, i.e. builder, technician, manager. Although the text was written in the early twentieth century (and the fight for equality has since developed), Riviere's idea of the 'masquerade' inspired the outrageous radicalism of many city centre based feminist performances during the 1970s - a time of radical creativity that would arguably still be deemed improper if similarly staged in Western public space today.

Many feminist artists developed new conceptual ideas inspired by changing politics during the 1970s (advances from the second-wave

10 This statistic was studied in the conference "Twenty-three percent," Royal College of Art (25th January 2013). 11 see Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," 1988, in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial, (London: Routledge, 2004), p 187-199. This essay is Butler's initial academic study that regards gender as a cultural act, she puts emphasis on comparing gender to an actor's theatrical performance. 12 Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," 1929, in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1986), p 38. 10

Fig. 2: VALIE EXPORT, Tapp und Tastkino, 1968.

Fig. 3: VALIE EXPORT, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, 1969. 11 feminist movement), which arguably not only transformed the way women politically represented themselves in art discourse, but challenged the construct of womanliness itself. Artists such as Hannah Wilke, VALIE EXPORT and Carolee Schneemann provocatively embraced public performance art to illustrate subversive identities that intentionally disrupted the recognised codes of femininity. Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT had particularly aggressive intentions when creatively masquerading her female identity during the late 1960s, where she often wore outlandish costumes and acted provocatively to challenge man's prevalent supremacy over women. Often using Vienna's city streets as a stage set, she understood the importance of interrupting male-dominated space (like the political activism of the Suffragette movement). Alongside the Viennese Actionists, she is recognised for operating disruptive events that challenged the rules of sexual representation, including the role- led dichotomy of male-as-active versus female-as-passive - a binary system that has continued to position gender difference in culture. Staged in the daylight city, Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968) was a (now infamous) interactive street performance that enabled strangers to physically interact with EXPORT's curtain-covered breasts (fig 2). Whilst setting up a physical critique of female objectification and intentionally positioning herself exposed in culture, this performance also places EXPORT with a sense of control and authorship over her own sexuality – she invites men to ‘touch’. Images of women dominate advertising space; “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”13 (see Act Two for a deeper investigation of this). Large-scale billboards present looking as culturally acceptable, but touching takes place in the darkness of the fringes; in the gentleman's club or the brothel, not in the proper situation of broad daylight. EXPORT further dominates this 'action' by directing her gaze as the actively looking female in confronting the roles of difference. Film theorist Laura Mulvey explains:

13 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p 47. 12

LAURA MULVEY "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly."14

The close proximity between the 'spectator' and performer enables EXPORT to hold an acute gaze where the codes of scopophilic desire are made strange and begin to dissolve, thus disjointing the idea of an active-male versus passive-female. EXPORT’s shock tactics were taken further in the 1969 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (fig. 3) which involved the artist parading around the interior of a European porn cinema whilst wearing a translucent suit with uncovered emphasis on the breasts and genitals. Whilst intervening in the screening, the artist pointed a phallic gun at unsuspecting audience members, this 'attack' has become indicative of a successful feminist intervention where power is symbolically possessed and the pedestrian male is affected. Both performances involve gestures of female empowerment that solidify a moment in feminist art history, their active qualities temporally position EXPORT as the female possessor of ultimate authority from within this scripted male-metropolis.

(PAUSE)

ELIZABETH WILSON "[...] the presence of women in cities, and particularly in city streets, has been questioned, and the controlling and surveillance aspects of city life have always been directed particularly at women."15

Structure is surveillance, surveillance is regulation, and the regulator has power. In an aesthetic departure from her antagonistic self-performances, EXPORT's photographic Body Configurations (1972-82, fig. 4) are a series of staged self portraits that physically adapt the structural regulatory signifiers that establish the shape of the city; the concrete walls and footpaths that determine confinement and

14 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," 1975, in Visual and Other Pleasures, Laura Mulvey, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p 19. 15 Elizabeth Wilson, "The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women," 1991, quoted in Doreen Massey, Space, Place & Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p 167. 13 direction. Marc Augé's anthropological study of the 'non-place of supermodernity'16 refers to the transitory spaces that individuals temporarily inhabit when in the process of completing a journey (in the city, this can be described as the pedestrian footpath). He refers to the symbolised attributes of power that are present in these environments, where temporary inhabitants are forced to follow a set of regulatory rules17, he suggests:

MARC AUGÉ "[...] the real non-places of supermodernity - the ones we inhabit when we are driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge [...] are defined partly by the words and text they offer us: their 'instructions for use', which may be prescriptive ('take right-hand lane'), [or] prohibitive ('No Smoking')"18

Rules of direction are avoided by EXPORT who positions her body curved around concrete structures as a fleshy add-on to footpaths and angular benches. She is a sculptural mimic who disturbs the physical order of space. EXPORT declares, "[...] as living pictures and sculptures, my photographic body configurations signify not only the double images of the (geometric and human) figures, but also of sociography and cultural history."19 The bold, hand drawn geometric lines which connect her to the props of that environment further enable the viewer to consider city structures as a physical metaphor for built culture. The artist stages the photographs herself (as distinct from the earlier images that exist as documents of performances), thus she further plays with the notion of regulation by introducing the camera as an object for 'surveillance' into her activity. In the photographic framing, she plays on her labelled role of the passive female by deliberately acting this out against existing regulatory rules by blocking the pathway required for a city to keep actively flowing. It could also be said that her awkward body politically signifies the social restraints enforced on women at the times of second-wave feminism or relate to

16 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London: Verso Books, 1995). 17 Also see Jean Baudrillard's emotive investigation of the descriptive characteristics in America's 'freeways', "To the person who knows the American freeways, their signs read like a litany. 'Right lane must exist.' This 'must exist' has always struck me as a sign of destiny. I have got to go, to expel myself from this paradise, leave this providential highway which leads me nowhere, but keeps me in touch with everyone.", Jean Baudrillard, America, 1986 (London: Verso, 2010), p 55-56. 18 Augé, Non-places, p 96. 19 VALIE EXPORT quoted in Centre National de la Photographie and Camden Arts Centre exhibition catalogue, VALIE EXPORT (France: Editions de l'oeil, 2003), p 157. 14

Fig. 4: VALIE EXPORT, Zurundung, 1982.

Fig. 5: Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, 1490.

15 actions during the Suffragette movement (consider when Emily Davison threw herself in front of the King's horse). Whilst here we acknowledge the artist's positive adaptations of the passive female, Griselda Pollock's reading of the aesthetic appearance of Zurundung further builds upon EXPORT's feminist critique. She relates the image to Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man (fig. 5):

GRISELDA POLLOCK "[EXPORT's] personal odyssey through a city performs a critical interruption of all that appears 'natural' in Leonardo's Vitruvian gesture. Firstly, the body she uses is not 'neutral'. It is not the standard canonical human body. It is a woman's body, which in a phallocentric universe can never be the body."20

Zurundung's abstract nature articulates meaning with regard to the ideal figure, with the connective geometric lines and circular footpath echoing the outer sphere in Leonardo's drawing. As well as adopting new feminine signification, the footpath also alludes to the biomorphic sphere-like motif21 associated with much feminist art produced around the same period. Pollock's feminist reading not only rivals the representation of the ‘ideal’ human figure by framing it as female (who 'lacks'), but positions it as not only disruptive of physical culture, but also of respected cultural art history; the 'ideal' man as designed by a male creator. If woman 'cannot be the body' within phallocentric culture, then is it possible for her feminine identity to instead intentionally get in the way.

FAST FORWARD TO 1995. IT’S LATE NIGHT IN LONDON CITY CENTRE. A WOMAN STANDS ILLUMINATED BY STREETLIGHTS ON VAUXHALL BRIDGE 'PISSING' ON THE FOOTPATH LIKE A MAN.

20 Griselda Pollock, "Towards the Virtual Feminist Museum," in Women Artists: elles@centrepompidou, ed. Centre Pompidou (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2009), p 323. 21 The shape suggested the womb-like 'core' of woman by enhancing a space independent from male signification, "[...] the overwhelming fact remains that a woman's experience in this society-social and biological-is simply not like that of a man. If art comes from inside, as it must, then the art of men and women must be different too. And if this factor does not show up in women's work, only repression can be to blame", Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), p 48. 16

In contrast to EXPORT's daytime performances (which lack the radical boldness of her earlier works), Sophy Rickett's Pissing Women (fig. 6) exploits the directional footpath more daringly by politically staging moments of feminine havoc in the city scene at night. In Fragments of the European City, Stephen Barber suggests:

STEPHEN BARBER "The European city at night is a bizarre blackout of its daytime self. [...] At night, the city exempts itself from controlling the proliferation of those imageries; the imageries of the city are then free to lapse into extremity."22

Rickett takes advantage of a CCTV camera's indistinct surveillance (for the women would further risk getting 'caught' performing in the daytime) by setting up a comical adaptation of female sexuality represented through a socially unacceptable gesture; the proud display of bodily excretion in public - an exciting example of radicality that has similarities to EXPORT's risky 'action' performances (i.e. Tapp und Tastkino). Androgynous and enterprising, this series of parodic photographs presents an indecent act executed by smartly dressed females who experiment with using the suitable city backdrop for dispelling patriarchal power structures. Signified by the performer wearing office clothing and 'pissing' standing up, the artist reduces male identity to masquerade; a parodic 'manliness' as alternative to Riviere's concept of 'womanliness'. Rickett positions this male performance as offensive whilst mocking the signifiers of phallic power (offensively highlighted by the form of a mock penis), reducing the authoritative control of male identity to a puddle of bodily waste.

This 'play acting' is further emphasised by the artist's manipulation of dramatic light and shadow, which can be likened to the aesthetics of a theatrical stage (the subject is lit in the foreground, whilst much of the background remains in darkness). Rickett illustrates an alternative version of Butler's idea of the male 'drag performer' who reveals female identity as a set of coded gestures as "[...] mere artifice, play, falsehood and illusion."23 However, in an exciting

22 Stephen Barber, Fragments of the European City (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), p 53. 23 Butler, Gender Trouble, p xxiii. 17

Fig. 6: Sophy Rickett, Pissing Women, 1995.

18 departure from this, the female artist parodies and reveals the signifiers of male identity instead.

Both EXPORT and Rickett interrupt structured identity regulation by acting out resistant performances within the setting of existing discourse. Whilst their different creations of subversive identities were produced in the physical space of the city, these artistic gestures can only remain as documents of past moments or strategies in the form of photographs. As we have seen, it is possible to deconstruct the strategies of gender performance by temporarily reconfiguring structural furniture (or behavioural 'norms') in the city-centre, however the act of 'performance' is only one aspect of gender constitution. Like the order of landscaped place, the structured signifiers of the 'image' can also be considered as another element for creating identity, as a figurative representation to be mimicked. Constructed in parallel to the visual attributes of an identity performance and recognisable in the city space, the image is presented in the diagram below.

PATRIARCHAL SPACE (CITY)

IDENTITY PERFORMANCE

STRUCTURE IMAGE

Images are vital for recognition, for a dramatic actor may refer to photographs of a past performer in order to construct their appearance correctly. In psychoanalysis, identity is constituted by and within the mirror image, this 'image' continues to compose identity throughout the everyday actresses existence in the form of media advertisements. In contrast to EXPORT and Rickett's guerrilla acts in physical space, we must therefore now reconsider the city image as a virtual, but constantly apparent identity structure.

(END OF ACT ONE) 19

FADE IN:

ACT TWO: RESISTANT IMAGES

HAIR, MAKE-UP, COSTUME. SHE RECOGNISES THE SIGNIFIERS OF PHYSICAL APPEARANCE THAT SHE MUST REPLICATE. AFTER COMPARING HERSELF TO THE IMAGES OF OTHERS WHILST SCRUTINISING HER REFLECTION; SHE COMMITS TO HER FATE AND PAINTS ON A FAKE, BLOOD-RED SMILE.

JOHN BERGER "To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. [...] A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself."24

LUCE IRIGARAY "[...] "femininity" is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, woman loses herself"25

Images of women are constructed throughout the spaces of the modern city. Epitomised as billboards and shop window displays, they publically project the signifying attributes of a media-designed, 'appropriate' femininity. Sociologist Erving Goffman suggests that "Any scene, it appears, can be defined as an occasion for the depiction of gender difference, and in any scene a resource can be found for effecting this display."26 In the city-centre scene, this 'resource' can be attributed to the media-designed gendered advertisements that display the (often hyper-real) coded image of Western female identity; illustrating culture's expectations of appearance and social behaviour, as Art historian John Berger suggests: woman "[...] is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself"27. This is recognisable in an example of a Chanel no. 5 advert (fig. 7) where the icons of a desirable identity are displayed as an image to the viewer, whilst the window's reflection in the photograph signifies the requirement to scrutinise oneself. The spectator of city images gazes

24 Berger, Ways of Seeing, p 46. 25 Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), p 84. 26 Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (London: Macmillan, 1979), p 9. 27 Berger, Ways of Seeing, p 46. 20

Fig. 7: Chanel No 5 advert, 2009.

21

Fig. 8: Dorothy Bohm, Poster, Venice, 1987.

22 at large-scale posters from a distance, glossy and immersive, adverts are constructed to be admired. However, if the viewer chooses to look more closely, to close the distance between one's gaze and image, they will be confronted by a less pleasing surface of cheap paper and oversized print grain (consider the enlarged newspaper appropriations by postmodern artist Barbara Kruger in the 1980s). Victor Burgin considers the material quality of the image in his debate regarding photography and painting:

VICTOR BURGIN "The surface of the photograph offers no reassurance of the founding presence of a human subject. [...] examined closely it fragments into infinitely evenly-spaced dispersions of grains"28

Dorothy Bohm visually explores these qualities in her colour photographs of ripped and layered city advertisements, where images such as Poster, Venice (fig. 8) present the pasted poster image of women as fragmented, rippled and dislocated in appearance. The image literally reframes advertising, appropriating a section of the original image that contests the stereotypical smooth, unmarked representation of woman's body in the photographs of commercial advertising. If a photograph's surface 'offers no reassurance' of a human subject, then a realistic identity can never exist in advertising space, thus, it is exciting to consider the visual (or physical) attributes that reveal the structure of an image. Therefore Burgin's closely viewed, 'evenly- spaced' grains can enable a significant reading of the photograph, where straightforward representation breaks and critiques visual structure. This grain can be further considered with regard to the appearance of glamorous large-scale video advertisements where on close inspection, images fragment into a series of indistinct pixels.

CHRISTINE ROSS "In [Pipilotti] Rist's work femininity is the starting point for discordant beings who fall, scream, grimace, smash or float, seeking to redefine-from within-norms of femininity."29

28 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, p 34. 29 Christine Ross, "Fantasy and Distraction: An Interview with Pipilotti Rist," Afterimage vol. 28 (3) (2000): 7. 23

Pipilotti Rist's video Open My Glade (fig 9 & 10) intervenes cultural advertising, by being intermittently screened between promotions on the digital screen in New York's Times Square. The artist forcibly touches the pixelated screen in flattening female representation. By pressing her cosmetic-covered face against the screen surface, Rist carnally performs a removal of the stereotypical beauty signifiers that constitute femininity, reducing them to a collection of dirty smears. An alternative identity performance is staged here, one that makes coded advertising space uncanny by confusing pedestrian spectators, contrasting with the glamorous representations of real commercials and threatening to rupture or burst out of the confined space of image culture. Although it isn't possible to break through this screen and her fragmentary performance may only stretch the tension of the image's surface30 itself; Rist provokes the image frame as a physical fabrication of patriarchy that designs women - confronting the 'image' itself as the source of the problem, a problem that political feminist artists since the 1970s have sought to dispel.

(PAUSE)

MIRROR, MIRROR UPON THE WALL...

In Decoding Advertisements, Judith Williamson suggests that advertisements can be considered with regard to the mechanics of Lacan's infamous 'Mirror Stage' in the way that they situate a subject's identity in relation to the world of images. She suggests that advertisements can be understood in terms of the 'Imaginary' and 'Symbolic' in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The Imaginary stands for a pre- constituted self and the Symbolic stands for a rule-bound 'cultural' identity, which can also be understood as the 'Social-I' or a 'Speaking Subject'. A unified Symbolic identity is illustrated by the signifiers of the glamorous ideal in advertising space, as Williamson states:

30 It is worthwhile considering Lacan's notion of the 'real', where the mediating image-screen's purpose is to keep the subject of representation at a safe distance from the spectator's gaze. Hal Foster considers this in regard to modern art in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: the Avant-guarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1996). 24

Fig. 9 & 10: Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade, 2000.

25

Fig. 11: Anonymous author, date unknown.

26

JUDITH WILLIAMSON "Ads set up, in your active relationship towards them, the fictional creation of an impossibly unified self: an 'Ego- Ideal'. They show you a symbol of yourself aimed to attract your desire; they suggest that you can become the person in the picture before you."31

Appealing advertisements mean the female city dweller is allured by imagery and wishes to mimic and become these 'fictional creations' (to adhere to the Symbolic), they set up a mechanics of looking at a 'whole' self that forces women to consider their own appearance. Contemporary city buildings are often constructed from strengthened glass, the mirror-like quality of these structures can allude to what Luce Irigaray describes as a "palace of mirrors"32 (see fig 11). These two-dimensional images represent women in the ultimate situation where they are not only expected to engage with images in advertising space, but must also identify themselves within the physical built structures of a law-governed patriarchy. I therefore would like to consider that to disrupt these structured surfaces of identification (as Bohm and Rist transform the aesthetics of advertising), an alternative, feminised model to Lacan's identity-constituting mirror should be engaged.

JACQUES LACAN "The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality."33

Lacan's mirror forms the "[...] transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image"34, in a psychoanalytic framework, the mirror is considered to be vital in enabling one to identify a relationship with the surrounding world. Whilst this mechanic of reflection situates the foundations for a subject's recognition of Symbolic culture (and sexual difference), this mirror is particularly important to a woman as it enables her to constitute a view of herself, to check that her 'made-up' appearance (her 'womanliness') is suitable

31 Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1978), p 65. 32 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (New York: Cornell University, 1985), p 137. 33 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2001), p 5. 34 Lacan, Écrits, p 2. 27 enough for her to correctly conform to culture's beauty requirements. Although we often rely on the mirror as reflecting a truthful version of reality, much postmodern criticism contests the reliability of these images. Susan Sontag famously explores the representative properties of the photographic image, considering 'photographic seeing' (cameras often rely of the reflex of an internal mirror) and states: "Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism"35. If this is true, then a less traditional mode of mirror reflection (photographic or real-time) may have the ability to represent women within a less structured framework.

CONSIDER THIS AS A ‘SURFACE-FEMININE’

LUCE IRIGARAY "Whence the intervention of the speculum and of the concave mirror, which disturb the staging of representation according to too-exclusively masculine parameters."36

The trouble with gender and the mirror object is that when a female subject gazes at her reflection, she is contained within the borders of its emulative structure. In tradition with the discourse disturbing ideas of the 'French feminists' who individually critique male ideas of sexual difference in psychoanalysis and philosophy, Luce Irigaray interrogates the psychoanalytic position of woman as ‘other’. In both Speculum of the Other Woman and The Sex Which is Not One, she disputes Lacan’s idea of crossing from the Imaginary to the Symbolic via the Mirror Stage by introducing her notion of a feminine mirror that contests his 'flat' mirror. This 'flat' mirror simply represents an imagined subjectivity within the confines of phallocentric thought whereas Irigaray's mirror is ‘curved’ in appearance, alluding to the curvaceous and interior nature of the feminine. Its shape means that the reflective edge is unclear, amorphously extended beyond the

35 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1978), p 87. Also see Simon Watney, "Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror," in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin, (London: Macmillan, 1982), p 154-176. Watney argues how the photographic image can be contested with regard to the authenticity of revealed meaning. "It does not require an especially strong sense of irony to appreciate the way in which a range of photographic techniques, which had been expressively developed to reveal the conditions of alienated life and consciousness, became themselves objects for alienated aesthetic contemplation, a shattered mirror which obediently continued to reflect the world as it is not.", p 171-73. 36 Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, p 155. 28 confines of the traditional flat, phallocentric mirror-image. She maintains: "A body becomes a prison when it contracts into a whole [...] When a line is drawn around it, its territory mapped out."37 The city's 'palace of mirrors' is constructed from solid structures which Gillian Rose considers in her essay As if the Mirrors had Bled: Masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade38, which further addresses the relationship between psychoanalysis, gender and built space. In addition to the toughened glass material of city buildings, Rose recognises that culturally, 'solid objects' constitute subjectivity:

GILLIAN ROSE "Belief in solids, in solid objects, in the material as simply there, is thus a guarantee of the subject's own subject-hood. A belief in the real is a belief in the self because it is a belief in a death displaced elsewhere"39

LUCE IRIGARAY "Fluid has to remain that secret remainder, of the one. Blood, but also milk, sperm, lymph, saliva, spit, tears, humours, gas, waves, airs, fire...light. All threaten to deform, propagate, evaporate, consume him, to flow out of him and into another who cannot easily be held on to."40

The threat of a subject's death can be considered through 'fluidity', which is often attributed to the feminine. 'Fluid' is a favoured topic of French feminism which often refers to the substances gathered in interior body space, particularly signified in Julia Kristeva’s theory of Abjection41, where bodily fluids resonate with the pre-Oedipal, 'semiotic' stage of subject development; the psychoanalytic stage concerning a pre-subject's relationship with the maternal body.

37 Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions (London: The Athlone Press Ltd, 1992), p 17. 38 Gillian Rose, "As if the Mirrors had Bled: Masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade," in Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan, (London: Routledge, 1996), p 56-74. 39 Rose, "As if the Mirrors had bled" in Bodyspace, p 69. 40 Irigrary, Speculum, p 237. 41 Abject substances are the discarded 'horrific' fluids of the body, such as blood or excrement, Kristeva suggests that if the maternal body must be repressed in order for Symbolic identity to be constituted, but these substances will continue to threaten this identity throughout a lifetime. “When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.”, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p 4. 29

Considering this in regard to the reflective possibilities of spilled liquid, it is possible to imagine a female-oriented image that (like Irigaray's concave mirror) contests the phallocentric mirror. The fluid of the city is illustrated through rivers, rainwater and the spilled substances of consumption (consider Sophy Rickett’s mimetic performance in Pissing Women). A natural substance, it resists containment and wildly spreads over the man-made surfaces of city pavements. I would like to introduce this idea as the ‘Surface-Feminine’; an uneven gendered substance that expands beyond the parameters of Lacan's identity-constituting mirror.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles spills buckets of soapy water to clean city streets (and gallery interiors) in her performance Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside (fig. 12 & 13). She introduces the notion of ‘Maintenance Art’ in her 1969 manifesto:

MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time, literally; the mind boggles and chafes at the boredom; the culture confers lousy status and minimum wages on maintenance jobs; housewives = no pay.”42

Whilst her main performative intentions pay attention to the drudgery of labour and the often female marginalised worker on the edge of culture (required to support patriarchy), the documentary photographs can further be considered to break with the male-defined representation of women when acknowledged through the terms of the Surface-Feminine. Opposing the smooth surface of Lacan's identity-constituting mirror, the artist's female reflection is constituted as bumpy and roughly textured within the pool of cleaning water. With the intention to be visible in the city, the artist produces her own image, one with expanding fluid boundaries that contrasts with the hard parameters of the phallocentric mirror.

Rut Blees Luxemburg’s photograph A Girl from Elsewhere (fig. 14) further elaborates the idea of a Surface-Feminine, particularly as its title suggests that the trail of liquid may have originated from the aftermath of an event of late-night female urination. Working in the city at night, when "[...] the imageries of the city are then free

42 Ed. Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist's Body. (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), p 206. 30

Fig. 12 & 13: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, 1973. 31

Fig. 14: Rut Blees Luxemburg, A Girl from Elsewhere, 2000.

32 to lapse into extremity"43 (as was suggested in Act One), Luxemburg's immersive photograph is not a straightforward illustration of the city, but instead an abstract composition removed from the wider context of the urban. The feminist Gillian Rose considers space as "[...] a performance of power, and of masculinist power in particular"44. She splits this theoretical space into binary parts that are contextualised in terms of gender: 'real' space (solid/masculine/the psychoanalytic Symbolic) and 'non-real' space (fluid/feminine/pre-Symbolic). In Luxemburg's photograph, these two ideas are fused together, with the feminine dribbling fluid hauntingly engulfing the man-laid concrete, seeping beyond the confines of the image frame and threatening to overwhelm the hard structures of masculine space.

If a belief in solid, real objects must be upheld for the Symbolic image of identity to be recognised within the city centre of culture, then the interruption of feminine fluids in this space reminds one of pre-linguistic subjectivity, a horrific condition that could threaten the constructed environment of patriarchy. The fluid in both Ukeles and particularly in Luxemburg's photographs can be considered to signify this abject reminder of the pre-Symbolic condition and a potential threat of (individual and spatial) identity regression. If we consider the order of the city in regard to the built structures and significance of Marc Augé's directional 'non-place', as described in Act One, then constructed architecture can also be regarded as boundaries that protect the male (Symbolic) subject from the sexualised threat of nature's fluid or feminine 'semiotic' substances - something that the next chapter will attempt to discourage.

As we have seen, there are relevant relationships between the notion of structure and space, image and identity. It is possible for women artists to both deconstruct the identity-constituting (media or psychoanalytically designed) photograph and to construct a different feminine image through the model of the Surface-Feminine. By building on past ideas such as the deconstructive grain of Burgin's postmodern image surface, there can be a radical reassessment of image production with regard to gender complexity. Women artists can allow non-rational possibilities to dispel the existing visual order that the pedestrian

43 Barber, Fragments of the European City, p 53. 44 Rose, "As if the Mirrors had bled" in Bodyspace, p 58. 33 female identity performer so heavily relies on. The virtual image of the Surface-Feminine allows woman to look at herself differently and thus scripting her act of performance alternatively. Thus, we must search further to consider other models that deconstruct built structure, where femininity can independently expand beyond controlled parameters and finally escape the stigma of sexual difference.

(END OF ACT TWO)

34

INTERMISSION

(SET CHANGE)

35

FADE IN:

ACT THREE: THE MATRIXIAL AS AN-OTHER

THE EDGE OF A CITY, NOT QUITE SUBURBIA. FRAGMENTED, IT STANDS FOR THE BORDER BETWEEN. AWAY FROM THE RANGE OF CCTV SURVEILLANCE, PHYSICAL ORDER AND THE MIRROR. THE JAGGED RIM THAT CONTAINS (BUT IS SEPARATED FROM) THE RULE BOUND CENTRE OF CONSTRUCTED SPACE. THIS IS SPACE TO BE DEVELOPED; AN INDEPENDENT IDENTITY IS POSSIBLE HERE.

NINA POWER "Many of the tactics of feminism thus far - rewriting cultural histories, reclaiming the body, occupying 'male' positions - have had significant effect, but have not been able to touch the basis of the problem at hand."45

In agreement with Nina Power, who reconsiders contemporary feminist attitudes in her book One Dimensional Woman, I suggest that further work must be done to displace the cultural framework of difference and representation. Through a lively study of women in working labour, politics or within the world of pornography, Power asserts that the core problem of 'equality' is still untouched - also consider this year's announcement to re-issue the radical feminist magazine 'Spare Rib'46 in the UK. The previous two Acts have considered the attempts that feminist artists and theorists have made to politically probe the structural problem of sexual difference by contesting identity construction in physical space and the image. But, if by now (in the so-called 'developed' countries of the West), the political voices of feminism argue that a system of equality is yet to be achieved then there must be a re-evaluation of the modes of societal interruption that have so far been enforced.

In The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity, Steve Pile suggests that: "[Cities] embody an illusory (real) power that subjects their inhabitants, and their spatial relations force people to conform to their rules under the threat of coercive laws"47 - this is true, as we have seen by the directions that feminists have taken so

45 Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman (Ropley: Zero Books, 2009), p 3. 46 Ben Dowell, "Spare Rib magazine to be relaunched by Charlotte Raven," The Guardian (25 April 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/25/sarah-raven-relaunch-spare-rib, (accessed 15 September 2013). 47 Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), p 142. 36 far. Structured space, like the structured order of gender identity is therefore a suitable element for re-evaluation. The artwork I have discussed so far has always contested situations from within the city centre (physical in the case of Act One, representational in the case of Act Two); we have positioned this setting (or in the case of this essay: the theatrical set) as the space for rule-bound discourse. If, (as Nina Power suggests) by attempting to 'occupy male positions', feminists have still not been able to dispel attitudes of woman as other, then these female creative's should engage with alternative modes of political production. These modes should exist on the radical periphery of structured order and meaning, as a feminine discourse which is not dependent upon patriarchy. Realistically, if feminist artists are intent on fully disabling existing structures, they must enforce situations more firmly, instead of momentarily intervening with existing systems, as demonstrated by the female artists in Acts One and Two. Women would need to fully demolish this space of structured order; cracking directional footpaths, burning all identity-constituting advertisements and shattering the glass of contemporary office blocks. Instead of this antagonistic behaviour (destructive warfare is too extreme), perhaps an original site for new ideas should be developed for women.

JANE RENDELL "Patriarchy assumes (and tries to enforce) that space is a binary system of separate and opposing halves, where the city is taken to be the public realm of men and the home is the private realm of women."48

A less distinct model of space should be embraced, maybe an environment of natural, pre-fabricated roughness with possibilities where space has the potential to be constructed differently. Liminal, this land should not be 'man's' public city, nor should it be 'woman's' landscaped suburbia - it should not seek to be governed by a set of binary laws, for this is a position of patriarchy. Carey Young's photographic series

48 Jane Rendell, ""Industrious Females" & "Professional Beauties" " in Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City, ed. Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro and Jane Rendell, (London: Routledge, 1996), p 25. 37

Fig. 15: Carey Young, Body Techniques (after A Line in Ireland, Richard Long, 1974), 2007.

Fig. 16: Carey Young, Body Techniques (after Circles, Ulrich Ruckreim, 1971), 2007.

38

Fig. 17: VNS Matrix, Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, 1991.

39

Body Techniques illustrate an example of this 'in-between' space in the context of urban culture, with relation to the city that has so far been contested in Acts One and Two. Vast, sandy, expansive - here women are able to consider their identities on the disorganised outskirts of culture. Young independently considers the border-rubble of ejected city waste (fig. 15) and dirties male dress by digging into this unmarked land in a gesture of archaeological discovery (fig. 16). This excavation into 'real' space is exciting, for a sense of untainted beginning can be found here. Hélène Cixous has protested for feminine language to be articulated, perhaps this space of the outskirts would be the possible setting for new communication:

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS "Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. [...] Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly.""49

The French Feminists of the 1970s introduced an écriture féminine, a (often meta-textual) gendered writing which is complex and symbolic, as demonstrated through the male discourse-disturbing ideas of Luce Irigaray in Act Two. With intention to disrupt the language of Symbolic culture and provide alternate speech, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous state the limitations of 'speaking within man's language', for:

LUCE IRIGARAY "When a girl begins to talk, she is already unable to speak of/to herself. Being exiled in man's speech, she is already unable to auto-affect. Man's language separates her from her mother and from other women, and she speaks it without speaking in it."50

In society, there has often been a requirement for women's communication to be disconnected from each other, which was a key goal of the political enhancements made during the Internet's impact on

49 Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa", Signs vol. 1, (4) (Summer 1976): p 876. http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/~davis/crs/e321/Cixous-Laugh.pdf (accessed 15 June 2013). 50 Luce Irigaray, "The poverty of psychoanalysis," quoted in Kelly Ives, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism, (Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing, 1998), p 38. 40 communication during the virtual Cyberfeminist movement51. Consider VNS Matrix's Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st century (fig. 17), which was displayed as a politically charged digital billboard before being distributed globally over the Internet. As a document, the work confidently manifests a feminist voice fuelled with sexually-charged aggression. Although its aesthetic appearance is unquestionably dated (for there has been extreme technological advances within digital design over the last 20 years), I wonder if the language of its textual message has also been lost in cyberspace. The problem with the Internet's virtual space is that it embraces temporality - although a digital message can evoke immediate political activism, the fast changing online world ensures its significance can be quickly replaced by something else.

Therefore if we are to imagine a new transgressive feminist discourse, it is imperative that for this, what Amelia Jones terms Parafeminist52, position to penetrate social structure absolutely, space, language and representation should be fully reconceived. There should be a new language for women to communicate in both vocal and visual terms - contemporary radical artists like Carey Young can now have the opportunity to build this alternate, feminine 'culture'.

(PAUSE)

51 David Bell paraphrases Katie Ward's idea that there is a two way separation of feminist engagement with cyberspace: "[...] 'online feminism' and 'online cyberfeminism'; the former is concerned more centrally with using computer-mediated communication as a way to further feminist politics generally [...], the latter engages more with technology itself, seeking to rewire it for a new cyberfeminist politics", David Bell, An Introduction to Cybercultures (London: Routledge, 1999), p 123. The internet's online space allowed women to globally translate their determination for independent thought through a less mediated virtuality than in patriarchal governed reality, for further reading see ed. Wendy Harcourt, Women@Internet: Creating new Cultures in Cyberspace (London: Zed Books Ltd, 1999).

52 Amelia Jones introduces 'Parafeminism' as a “[...] radical extension and reworking of [feminist] strategies, ideas, and political values”, Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject (Oxon: Routledge, 2006), p 210. The emphasis on 'Para' refers to a progression, breaking away from the recognised art-speak term 'Post', which suggests that a movement is over. 41

CONSIDER THIS AS 'BORDERSPACE'

BRACHA L. ETTINGER "Whereas in Lacan's late theory (the) "woman" is Other even when she is a between center and nothing, in the Matrix she is not a radical Other but a border-Other, a becoming in- ter-with the Other, an im-pure becoming-between in jointness."53

At the beginning of Act Two, I considered how the material quality of photographic grain can reveal an identity with no relation to an individual. The media-constructed picture of woman is only ever an 'image', "a visible impression"54 where it is only possible for the literal subject to exist as a representation. I feel that it is possible to have an alternative negotiation (a rearrangement) of grain. If we consider woman's new space as positioned upon the gritty edge of the city, then this grainy-textured substance has the potential to be physically organised and theoretically incorporated into meaning, with similar qualities of progression as demonstrated through the transgressive mechanism of the Surface-Feminine.

Bracha L. Ettinger is an psychoanalyst and visual artist fascinated by the possibilities of constructing new meaning with redistributing image grain and the archaeology of relationships between women (see Woman- Other-Thing, no. 12, fig. 18). She developed this interest by embodying its tactile aesthetic quality into a new, feminine psychoanalytic model as illustrated through her process of 'artworking'. Her art visually articulates relationships between the archival photographic image and a theoretical, unconscious space which she has termed a 'borderspace'; where "[...] non-relating entities come into a mutually transforming rapport."55 This 'mutual rapport' describes how Ettinger considers the future of a feminine psychoanalysis named the 'Matrix'. Based on a theory that different subjects are connected via theoretical 'strings' or 'threads' that weave multiple 'part-subjects' together (a 'part- subject alluding to collective identities who share experiences, such

53 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p 112. 54 http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/image?q=image (accessed 10 September 2013). 55 Griselda Pollock, "Trauma, Time and Painting: Bracha Ettinger and the Matrixial Aesthetic," in Carnal Aesthetics: transgressive imagery and feminist politics, ed. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013), p 28. 42 as the artist and art viewer56 who gain a togetherness through the gaze), this alternative theory stands apart from Lacan's 'Phallus', which is based upon the idea of the Symbolic cut of castration and binary systems to determine independent subjectivity. "Ettinger’s ideas offer the hope that identities might not have to be achieved either sacrificially or at someone else’s expense."57 Her theory invests attention to the lack of study attributed to a feminine psychoanalysis as denied by Freud58 and minimally acknowledged by Lacan in his latter career59, who suggested: "The Other is not simply the locus in which truth stammers. It deserves to represent that to which woman is fundamentally related."60 Ettinger explores the psychic mechanism of 'Fascinance', where women can feel a desirable connection when encountering others. For example, she considers the desire that Freud's Dora had for Madonna as a surrogate mother figure61 whilst suggesting a complexity of relationships between pre and post-natal women.

BRACHA L. ETTINGER "Please look at me once. You are my dead aunt, or you are my living aunt or you are someone I known. Lost, you do not stop raising questions in me. In painting, face to face, face to non-face. A moment before leaving again. Mother-I, my aunt could have been my daughter."62

The loose structural appearance of Woman-Other-Thing, no. 12 signifies the connective aspects of the Matrix. Hazy in quality, it loosely drifts within the frame in a fashion that builds upon the Surface- Feminine's anti-structural liquid image. Her photocopy-paintings are

56 "The viewer as a partial subject discerns the matrixial gaze via conductible borderlinks, interlinking while transmitting affects and pathic information, and transscribing uncognized subknowledge.", Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p 155. 57 http://cmcep.uprrp.edu/Bracha_Ettinger/index.html (accessed 12 August 2013). 58 "If you want to know more about femininity, inquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper or more coherent information.", Sigmund Freud, "On Femininity", 1964, quoted in Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p 22. 59 see ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX Encore 1972-1973. (translated by Bruce Fink, New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1998). Lacan acknowledges the female within a new psychoanalytic dimension in relation, but not 'other' to the Phallus. "Analytic experience attests precisely to the fact that everything revolves around phallic jouissance, in that woman is defined by a position that I have indicated as "not whole"", p 7. Lacan's 'not whole' is developed by Ettinger into Matrixial 'part-subjects'. 60 Ed. Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Female Sexuality, p 81. 61 see Bracha L. Ettinger, "Fascinance and the Girl-to-m/Other Matrixial Feminine Difference," in Psychoanalysis and the Image, ed. Griselda Pollock, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p 60-93. 62 Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrix Halal(a)-Lapsus: Notes on Painting, 1993, quoted in Pollock, "Trauma, Time and Painting: Bracha Ettinger and the Matrixial Aesthetic," in ed. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, Carnal Aesthetics, p 27. 43

Fig. 18: Bracha L. Ettinger, Woman-Other-Thing, no. 12, 1990-1993.

Fig. 19: Bracha L. Ettinger, Expanded Symbolic, 200663

63 Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p 7. 44 produced from a collection of archival images (ranging from Holocaust victims to Freud's 'hysterical woman'), Hebrew text (Ettinger's mother- language) and oil paint often mixed with the texture of dust from photocopy toner. Ettinger has a rhythmic process of art production that involves a layering of material, making the subject of the work difficult to decipher, particularly due to the combination of using the mechanical photocopier and manual brushwork that purposely sweeps muddy purple tones across the canvas. Warm print toner is transformed into an almost indecipherable form, and the relationship between granular photocopy and a painterly intervention mean that images simultaneously appear and disappear like the ongoing experience of repressed trauma, or the fragile condition of an unfixed chemical photograph. The artist obsessively repeats her process of production and may even seek to adapt works after an exhibition, in further complicating the image's signification and decipherability.

This Act began by considering the formation of a new language and Hélène Cixous' desire for women to 'Write!', which has undoubtedly been achieved through a consideration of Ettinger's theory. Perhaps 'blasphemous' or difficult to understand when read in Symbolic culture, Ettinger's style of vocabulary is often made up of a formulaic play on words such as 'com-passion' and 'in(ter)-visible'. Although challenging, this new language is an example of one that can be considered revolutionary, for if it was easily understandable within rational Symbolic culture, it would unwittingly conform to the rules of existing male language and fail as a productive Parafeminist discourse.

Ettinger does acknowledge the Phallus in her ideas (for it would be difficult to relinquish all elements of pre-existing male thought), she positions it in relation to the Matrix (see her diagram of The Expanded Symbolic, fig. 19). If the city centre is the environment for the psyche's construction via the Phallus, then the Matrix is responsible for a more feminine acceptable subject construction within the borderspace of the city outskirts. Like the possibilities for transgressive behaviour at night (as in Sophy Rickett's Pissing Women in Act One), the anti-structural characteristics of the disordered, unsanitized outskirts can acquire moments of avant-guard expression away from the city centre's ordered space and surveillance. This space of 'not yet constructedness' enables an archaeological freedom for 45 women where raw language (such as Ettinger's new style of vocabulary) is able to metamorphosize between inhabitants by the encouraged partaking of role play between Ettinger's partial-subjects. In this space, the grainy surface of the identity-constituting image and the granular dust of freshly inhabited land collide, in laying the foundations for a new feminine subjectivity.

(END OF ACT THREE)

46

EPILOGUE: [ART]WORKING-AS-LANGUAGE

THE AUDIENCE ENTHUSIASTICALLY APPLAUDS, POLITE CHEERS ECHO THROUGHOUT THE DEEP, INTERIOR SPACE. THE PROTAGONIST GRACEFULLY STEPS DOWN FROM THE RAISED THEATRICAL STAGE.

SELF "I conclude my performance on the edge, on the dusty periphery of this stage, for you have just witnessed my very last time. I would like to thank you all for coming, for supporting the character who you believed to be real. Your approval has kept me believing for all of this time."

This essay has considered the notion of feminine identity construction, through a consideration of space, performance and image. Patriarchy's construct of the city centre has provided the metaphorical setting for this investigation, with its environment functioning to construct identities based on the binary system of male-as-active versus female- as-passive, whilst constantly regulating this rational behaviour.

By initially considering Judith Butler's interpretation of gender identity as a type of culturally constructed role-play performance, it was possible to find both non-rational and 'resistant' feminist performances (VALIE EXPORT, Sophy Rickett) that challenged the system on the level of a political intervention. Although, due to the nature of the city's surveillance culture and organised space, I feel that these moments could only be deemed successful on a very temporary basis (consider how Rickett's performance could only take place during the night). Act Two then considered images in the city as physical apparatuses for controlling female appearances; those that pre-define and constitute the physical recognition of identity, by focusing on both the representation of women in media advertisements and considering the mirror in male-scripted psychoanalysis. By considering psychoanalysis' process of subject development, it was possible to find alternative city-centre images to represent women within a more feminine visual language through what I have situated as the fluid 'Surface-Feminine'. However, as considered at the beginning of Act Three, due to recent feminist discourse and current issues in the media, it is clear that further political efforts should be embraced as the past mechanism of male appropriation (whilst temporarily 47 rupturing), have heavily relied upon the original structures in patriarchy.

Only through the écriture féminine of the French feminists and more recently the theoretical work of Bracha L. Ettinger (who reconceptualises the notion of pre-subjective identity structure itself), we can begin to consider new strategies that move modes of thinking outside male-dominated space, on the disorganised fringes of the city. If the passion-fuelled action demonstrated by the performances of Act One and the radical feminine representations of Act Two can be re-configured through this new theoretical 'borderspace', there are possibilities for alternative situations where women can wholly resist the problematic structures of patriarchy. The rawness of this new space can enable connectivity between women through the unregulated environment, where base language is non-determined by hierarchical separateness, but able to develop through natural communication.

Throughout this essay, the relationship between identity and the mechanics of looking have been considered (from dispelling the male gaze to conceptualising slippery meaning from a close distance) in relation to different artworks from the last forty years, I therefore feel that the notion of image decipherability should be regularly re- evaluated in order to progress a feminist discourse. Radical new ideas can be communicated through artwork, as we have seen most directly through the work of Bracha L. Ettinger. Her artwork is almost indecipherable, but this anti-formalist visual language actively performs new transgressive and Parafeminist ideas, ideas that can be considered and progressed by other contemporary female artists. The idea of a bad or (as Ken Miller suggests) a photography that is 'wrong'64 opens up new possibilities for visual vocabulary, for recognising "[...] qualities in the image beyond the technical concerns of 'correct' photography."65 'Wrong' aesthetics enable an artist to convey new meaning away from the confines of readable, coded signification that culture (particularly in the art museum) enforces.

64 Ken Miller, "The Moment" in Shoot - Photography of the Moment (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc, 2009), p 29-33. 65 Miller, "The Moment" in Shoot, p 33. 48

Fig. 20: Uta Barth, Field #9, 1995.

Fig. 21: Susan Silton, Screenshot from Hemidemisemiquaver66, 2000.

66 Extract of video is available online at: www.vimeo.com/46635483 (accessed 15 September 2013). 49

As two final examples to conclude, I suggest that (with similarities to Ettinger's work) the blurred, 'wrong' aesthetics of Uta Barth's contemporary photographs (see Field #9, fig. 20) and Susan Silton's video Hemidemisemiquaver (fig. 21) successfully connects the notions of transgressive borderspace and representation through their indistinct appearances.

Barth's photographs flatten space into a series of blurred shapes and decoded gestures, they are created by the artist focusing on an object before removing it and photographing the soft background. Silton's Hemidemisemiquaver involves the artist holding a video camera at arm's length before quickly spinning in circles within an open environment. Both artists concentrate on the margins of space, presenting it as indistinct and open for interpretation. The in-camera images allude to Ettinger's granular artworks that lack formal clarity and exaggerate a drifting, ambiguous representation. The viewer is unable to focus on one 'whole' element, unable to comprehend a clear visual structure and therefore the images have an incompleteness. Through the mechanics of conceptual art, Barth's and Silton's images are two examples that aesthetically communicate similar ideas and that can be considered as illustrating Ettinger's notion of connectivity between part-subjects to produce a weaved system of whole knowledge. By embracing these 'wrong' aesthetic connections (those which oppose the culturally correct), a series (or group art exhibition) has the potential to metaphorically represent the possibilities of identity through a matrixial framework as opposing the existing phallocentric language that disconnects genders and defines women as other.

Within the evolving borderspace, transgressive 'bad photography' is therefore a suitable Parafeminist discourse to move feminist art forward, particularly as 'bad' images excavate existing representation and ultimately signify a break of pre-existing structures and ordered subjectivity. The hope is that feminist artists start collaborating via their matrixial strings of connection to move forward so as to create new female gestures, gestures that resist falling back to ordered representation, as seen before.

(END OF PERFORMANCE) 50

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TALKS / LECTURES

Conference, Twenty-three percent, Royal College of Art (25th January 2013).

Bracha L. Ettinger. Maternal Subjectivity and the Matrixial Subject, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdkbYsjlMA8 (accessed 18 August 2013).