Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art (Aesthetics Today)

209 Pages·2003·2.27 MB·English

by  Penny Florence

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Sexed
Universals
In Contemporary Art
PENNY FLORENCE
ALLWORTH
PRESS
NEW YORK
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© 2004 Penny Florence
All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention,
Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright
Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of the publisher.
07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
Published by Allworth Press
An imprint of Allworth Communications, Inc.
10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010
Cover design by Derek Bacchus
Cover photo: Detail from Marsyas 2002, by Anish Kapoor. Courtesy
Tate Modern and the artist. © Tate London 2003.
Interior design and page layout by SR Desktop Services, Ridge, NY
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Florence, Penny.
Sexed universals in contemporary art / Penny Florence.
p. cm.—(Aesthetics today)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58115-313-9 (pbk.)
1. Identity (Psychology) in art. 2. Gender identity in art.
3. Sex role in art. 4. Arts, Modern—20th century. 5. Arts,
Modern—21st century. I. Title. II. Series.
NX650.I35F57 2004
700'.453—dc22
2004004426
Printed in Canada
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IN MEMORY OF
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Painter
1912–2004
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contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword ix
CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Into the Thick of Things 1
CHAPTER 2: On Universals, Myth, and Morphogenesis 29
Part I: Universals and Invariance
Part II: Myth and Morphogenesis
CHAPTER 3: Playing Balls with Matisse, Picasso, and Himid 43
CHAPTER 4: Sexing the Modern with Manet, Morimura, 59
and Sam Taylor-Wood
Part I: Cosmic Barmaids, Cross-Dressed Bullfighters
Part II: Demotic Speech, Universal Subject:
Taylor-Wood and Morimura
CHAPTER 5: Myth, Utopia, and the Non-Narratable Self 95
Part I: Savage Stories, Gauguin’s Joy
Part II: The Ghost of a Blind Spot: Lyne Lapointe,
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
CHAPTER 6: The Devil’s Interval: Barbara Hepworth, 129
Anish Kapoor, and Liz Larner
CHAPTER 7: A Valediction: Nationalism and Melancholia; 165
Sex, War, and Modernism
Index 181
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acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the support of many more than
I can name here. The ways in which colleagues and students contribute to schol-
arly research are very hard to define, but I have been in the situation where I
have had to write without them. That former absence makes me appreciate them
all the more.
The research students on the PhD programme at Falmouth College of
Arts, U.K. were an enabling and stimulating presence throughout the develop-
ment of the ideas that inform the book, and they have kept me on my toes. I
want to thank them for their commitment and integrity. I have engaged in some
wonderful discussions with the staff and students on the MFA program at Art
Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, where I have been privileged to
be a Visiting Speaker on many occasions for some years. Joanna Hodge and
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe read the manuscript and it is much improved as a result.
Of course they bear no responsibility for its imperfections. With them, Norman
Bryson has been a highly valued interlocutor, as have Linda Anderson, Margaret
Whitford, Petra Kuppers and Nicola Foster, and the members of the Women’s
Philosophy Review.
A research leave grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board
allowed me to complete the writing, while the British Academy supported my
conference activities. Falmouth College of Arts research fund contributed to the
development of this work from inception to completion, and I am extremely
grateful for this sustained support. I regret to say that recent political decisions
in the United Kingdom will mean the withdrawal of such opportunities from all
but a few universities, and I wish to register a strong protest at this money-led
approach to education and research. Finally, thanks to the Slade University
School of Fine Art and University College London for their contributions
towards later changes.
Particular sections of this book draw on material that I have published
elsewhere. The discussion of cross-dressing in chapter four, part one, derives
from my essay in Lund, Lagerroth, and Hedling, Interart Poetics, Amsterdam:
vii
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Rodopi, 1997. The idea of the “cybiog” has appeared in “Cybiog and Sexed
Digitalia” in a special issue of Digital Creativity, Autumn 2003, though here it is
rather a question of the article drawing on this book than the other way around.
The fundamentals of chapter five, part two, were worked out in the lecture
given at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on the occasion of Liz
Larner’s mid-career retrospective in 2001. I want to thank them for their invita-
tion and their considerable assistance; and finally, chapter seven draws closely on
my essay in the final volume of the Disciplines, Fields, Changesseries, Article
Press, 2002, edited by John and Jacquie Swift. My warm thanks to them.
viii
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foreword
APRÈS POST: A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR OF
THE “AESTHETICS TODAY” SERIES
I am a Hittite in love with a horse. I don’t know what blood’s
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blond I am a baboon eating a banana
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in the birches,
and I’ve just caught sight of the Nina, thePinta and theSanta Maria.
What is this land, so free?
—Frank O’Hara, from “In Memory of My Feelings”
“Within the Humanities in the ‘West’, there have been decades of decon-
struction and opposition. The time has come to evolve new values.”
—Penny Florence
I may be truly free in the last moments of my life, but until then I can at least
aspire to go beyond my present limitations.
And with that aspiration I sat at a little round table in a hotel room, first
in Badenweiler and now in Le Muy, reading Penny Florence’s manuscript,
Sexed Universals.
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