Naked women scare men; the hegemonic masculinity in present culture might initially read in opposite terms, but despite being a simplification, there is truth in such a statement. Simplified out of that statement is the contextual agency of the nude body specific. In addressing the role of the body in performance art, the statement could be reframed this way: naked female artists scare men artists. The feminist performance art of Carolee Schneeman, art that utilizes the artist’s body explicit while establishing the agentic embodiment of the artist, threatened the male dominated aesthetic of the art world. In her work, that opening phrase receives its final rephrasing: naked female artists, as art, scare men.
Schneeman did not introduce nudity to art; a walk through the Louvre, for example, blasts vision with an assortment of naked bodies in paint and stone that reach back into antiquity. Nor was she the first artist to have work dismissed through the scandal of nakedness. Olympia, Manet’s response to Titian’s The Venus of Urbino, caused uproar because of the seemingly self-satisfied glare held by the painted courtesan.[1] But while Olympia, as Rebecca Schneider puts it, “challenged the pretext that she exists only to be possessed by the owner/viewer/consumer of her image,” was there any feminine agency?[2] Schneider continues: “it is worth noting that regardless of both pretext and anti-pretext, regardless of gaze and supposed counter-gaze, the frame of ‘art’ remained intact. Olympia’s disdainful glance existed under Manet’s authorizing signature [emphasis mine], and under the more invisible signature of those who determined the membership in the category of decided, ‘great,’ or canonical art.”[3] The point being that wherever one’s opinion falls when scaling degrees of rebelliousness in Olympia’s apparent look, “neither ‘Olympia’ nor the model Victorine Meurent who posed as Olympia with supposed self-possession could co-sign the painting or wield even an ounce of art-historical agency.”[4]
Despite the momentary disapproval Manet felt, there is no debating that all of his work, Olympia included, enjoys membership in the art-history cannon. Schneeman’s piece Eye/Body, for example, and feminist performance art like it, on the other hand, maintains a position of relative condemnation even as almost four decades have passed. Schneider pinpoints why this was/is the case: “Nudity was not the problem. Sexual display was not the problem. The agency of the body displayed, the author-ity of the agent – that was the problem.”[5] What occurred was a destruction of the traditional artist/art binary. “In Eye/Body Schneeman was not only image but image-maker,” writes Schneider. The result? “She [Schneeman] found herself excommunicated from the ‘Art Stud Club.’ George Maciunus, father of Fluxus, declared her work too ‘messy’ for inclusion.”[6] Maciunus was using vague aesthetic descriptors for purposes of exclusion; Schneeman was hitting a nerve in the masculine art concept.
The body in art is not valid singularly when fulfilling this role. There is, however, uniquity when feminist performance art, like Schneeman’s, combines the explicit body (in the form of the artist’s own physique) with conscious establishment of embodiment. This art challenges notions of gender in relation to the patriarchal politics within the art world in specific, and the social situation of the feminine body in general.
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