1 Helen McGhie AN-OTHER: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS By Helen McGhie Words: 8,837 [email protected] MA Photography 2013 2 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 3 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 4 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. 5 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. 7 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