Desiring normality
she was labelled with vanity
Whilst some said she chose
every change to her body
In plastic
1 Brain & Body, Brain vs Body
The painter Gwen John was both gifted artist and muse to the sculptor Rodin. She painted and she posed, exercising cerebral artistry and physical dexterity in her own work whilst responding intellectually and bodily to Rodinâs creativity. For an artist, painting is creative and physically demanding. This is nowhere better exhibited than through Gwen Johnâs Self-Portrait in a Red Blouse.1 In the biography Gwen JohnâA Life, Sue Roe explains that the picture âwould have required endless, meticulous concentrationâ.2 Finding it physically strenuous, even exhausting, Gwen John herself âlikened painting in oils to doing houseworkâ.3 Her words are echoed by women working in the arts, including sculpture,4 ceramics,5 photography,6 craft,7 filmmaking8 and directing.9 As director and filmmaker Karen Buczynski-Lee says:
Making a film is like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, moving, thinking and communicating multidimensionally to translate artistic vision into the film medium. Without physical and mental multitasking, filmmaking cannot happen.10
This epitomises Gwen Johnâs life. In her work, as in the work of the sculptor Camille Claudel,11 another of Rodinâs muses, she exemplified the reality that women are both brains and body, body and mind.
Yet the way womenâs bodies have been regarded over time tends to undercut this truth. It is not simply that many looking upon the work of artists or sculptors may fail to realise that the figure of the woman there represented is more than body, more than emotional energy or inspiration for the man (as it usually is)12 who painted or sculpted her. In all lifeâs realms, woman-as-body rather than woman-as-mind or, better still, woman-as-mind-and-body, has a propensity to dominate. Thus, the invention of photography and film heralded new ways to represent women in the same old way. Woman-as-body was confirmed and promoted through these new mediums, harbingers of the twentieth-century invention of the beauty contest13 and the film actor as star, then as celebrity. In the Countess de Castiglione, Abigail Solomon-Godeau provides an example of the way photography solidified the traditional notion of woman-as-object, despite the Countessâ engagement as a director of her own images, bringing ingenuity, creativity, skill and knowledge of the camera and what it could do. As Solomon-Godeau recounts, from the mid- to the end of the nineteenth century, Countess de Castiglione was photographed relentlessly by Louis Pierson of Mayer & Pierson.14 On some accounts, in her younger years, then as she aged, photographers Adolph Braun and Gaston Braun respectively trained their lenses untiringly upon her, too. Yet she was equally untiring. This woman who has historically been depicted as a willingly accommodating human object was anything but. However apparently compliant in the eye of the camera (and the cameraman) she might appear, the Countess was at work, mind and body. Both famous and infamous in her pursuit of the celluloid image, she was photographed in poses unconventional for one of her class, dĂ©shabillĂ©, legs akimbo and flying, head winsomely leaning towards the camera.
Styling her essay âThe Legs of the Countessâ, Abigail Solomon-Godeau reclaims the Countess as actor and director of herself as subject. She draws attention to the three types of women who publicly populated the period of the Second (French) Empire and the Third (French) Republic when the Countess figured in the eye of the lens. These three were the prostitute, uniting (to paraphrase Solomon-Godeau) in her person both the commodity and the seller; the dancer or actress being âthe spectacle within the spectacle â who is perceived as a type of circulating goodsâ; and the âbeautiful, worldly womanâ, both idea and ideal âendlessly hypostatized, scrutinized and dissectedâ.15 It was at this time that Karl Marx wrote âThe Fetishism of Commoditiesâ.16 Solomon-Godeau remarks and reflects upon this, drawing attention to the increasing fetishisation and commodification of women and womenâs bodies during this period. Simultaneously, the industrial revolution led to a downgrading of skills on which women prided themselves and for which they had had some acknowledgement. Industrialisation homogenised production and, hence, the work and the workers creating the product. Women as workers took on the role of automaton in the factory, or body on the street. Women who did not work in the world of industry became celebrated as âthe lilies of the fieldâ.17 Idealised as neither toiling nor spinning, they graced society as objects to be looked upon, their value lying in the bodies they inhabited and the clothes they wore.18
The following century, the focus on womenâs bodies, and women as bodies, if anything deepened. Womenâs attention to their own bodies as if they were canvases to be worked upon and titivated, transformed and changed at the hands of women themselves, or through the hands of others employed to renovate their person, intensified. Writing in 1993, Susan Bordo examined this phenomenon. She expressed concern that in the 1980s, âa decade marked by the reopening of the public arena to womenâ, women were âspending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long timeâ.19 For Bordo, the principal influence in this is not âchiefly ⊠ideologyâ, but âthe organization and regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily livesâ. This, she said, âtrains, shapes and impressesâ womenâs bodies with âthe stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininityâ.20 Womenâs bodies, rather than brains, were foregrounded, the trap set by ever-increasing cosmetics and perfume productionâalongside a growing aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery industry.
Todayâs women, Susan Bordo posits, are engaged in the pursuit of âan ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininityâ, a pursuit without end.21 Women are required constantly to âattend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashionâ. Womenâs bodies thereby become âdocile bodiesâbodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regu...