It is no stretch to say that cosmetics, the make-up products found in retailers worldwide, are often tools of objectification. Make-up, when applied to the face, creates a mask, a “made-up” appearance, one that is supposedly more appealing to those who might find that face in their line of vision. Altering the visual appearance of the face with these substances is not intrinsically gendered, but given that women are the dominant consumers of these products, and that certain made-up facial appendages on women are fetishized in western culture (red-lips, rouged cheeks, etc), it is safe to assume that the focus of these tools of objectification is the feminine countenance.
If a goal of feminism is an attack on the idea of woman as object, it seems unlikely that any feminist artist would willingly reproduce images easily mistaken as antagonistic to that goal, art that might appear sympathetic to male fetishization of female form. Martha Wilson’s Painted Lady (1972), out of context and for mere face value, does just this. Wilson’s willing submission to objectification, however, does not reify male hegemony. Wilson situates objectification as utility; she puts masculine notions of the required feminine aesthetic to work for her.
That Wilson does this is not completely lost on her audience, but the goal of Painted Lady has been misinterpreted, particularly early on in its existence, despite any awareness of objectification as utility. Jayne Wark comments: “works like Painted Lady (1972), in which Wilson transformed herself into a paradigm of hyperbolic femininity, have given rise to interpretations of her work as preoccupied with how beauty myths objectify and oppress women.”[1] That these types of interpretations exist indicate just how deep the objectification of women runs; this is actually what Wilson was addressing. Wark continues, “By manipulating the binary framework and naturalizing narratives of gender identity, Wilson revealed how they obscure and authenticate the masculinist assumptions of artistic identity.”[2] Wilson makes use of the Brechtian dialectic, within which Wark quotes Elin Diamond as arguing, “the performer-subject disappears neither into a representation of the character nor into a representation of the actor: each remains processual, contingent, incomplete,” to situate herself in a position of hyper-consciousness. From this vantage point Wilson is able to guide objectified notions of identity through social signifiers of beauty into the realm of utility, and once there, society’s, men’s, the audience’s, whole mess of intertwined expectations is forced to address itself.
Not every viewer is aware of the critical churning of expectations that objectification creates, or that Wilson employs, this would negate the need to (and/or the possibility to) utilize these notions to artistic effect. Wilson, conscious of the existence and deep rootedness of objectification, summons enough artistic wherewithals to maintain a double-consciousness while sending her performative body deep into a situation of immanent masculine/social assumptions about female/artist identity. Objectification, subsequently, becomes a tool to address objectification.
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