From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 08/25/02-05:14:31 AM Z
ARTHURWG@aol.com wrote:
>
> Solomon-Godeau goes on to quote French critic Jean Clair, who says:
>
> "Vision is not only a passive feminine recetacle where the real gets
> photographed , but it is also phalloid organ able to unfold and erect
> over its cavity and point toward the visible. The gaze is the erection
> of the eye."
Like most other postfeminist stuff I've seen, this makes no sense to me
at all. (Perhaps I coined a new word there inadvertently. I meant to
write "postmodernist," but I think actually "postfeminist" is a good
word for that kind of academic "feminist" theory.) I'm a longtime
feminist, tireless in pushing for opportunities for women,
equal pay for equal work, and equal respect for equal expertise. I
don't have an ounce of tolerance for sexism, even (or maybe especially)
in its subtler forms (more about that later.) But this feminist critique
stuff has nothing to do with any feminism that I recognize, or for that
matter with good sense or respectable scholarship, in my opinion. My
personal favorite was the one that said that the male organ is
equivalent to the square root of minus one, but there are so many
ridiculous examples to pick from, it's hard to have just one favorite.
I certainly hope no one is getting tenure for dreaming up this stuff; if
they are it may be time to storm the gates of the academy with
pitchforks, or at least cut off funding from certain departments.
I've been away this week and came back to 261 messages, which I sifted
through yesterday afternoon. Generally if I have a backlog I delete a
philosophical discussion without bothering to read any of it, but there
are a few folks whose posts I always read, and more of those contributed
to this week's discussion than usual, so after I read theirs I ended
up reading enough of the discussion to get the flavor of all the
viewpoints, I think. Since I read it all at once, the different threads
are all run together in my head and what comments I make will include
thoughts coming out of different threads of the discussion. A general
comment: this is the first discussion of this type I've seen on this
list that included so many different voices and opinions without
deteriorating into personal insults. Maybe we're all learning how to do
this better.
After I finished going through the week's posts, I went out to an
opening of a show of watercolors of nude obese women. The paintings were
beautiful, stunning. I looked at them a long time, not because of the
subject matter but because of the mastery and strength and power of the
drawing and painting; they were beautiful as visual objects in and of
themselves. They could have been male nudes, or cows, or landscapes or
any other organic shapes; the content was irrelevant to the visual
appeal of the work. This artist is very popular locally and has tended
in the past toward realistic depictions of picturesque boat yards and
local scenes; I was pleased to see him expanding his vision.
Then I came to the artist statement, where the artist described his
longterm repugnance for overweight women and his purpose in painting
them: to try to overcome this repugnance and see beauty in what repels
him. This statement did not enhance the show for me. The artist is an
acquaintance of mine and while I'm not obese, I'm not as trim as
I used to be, and the next time I see him coming down the street, I
won't feel as comfortable greeting him and chatting as before. I'd just
as soon he'd kept his thoughts private and let his pictures speak for
themselves, which they do quite well.
Which brings me to the question of whether there are two kinds of
artists, and if so what the categories should be called. Surely I'm
misremembering, surely no one suggested that the two types of artists
are those who think art should be about ideas vs those who take pictures
of sunsets and kittens? I've never seen a photograph of a sunset or a
kitten in a gallery, and I can't imagine an MFA student being so
unsophisticated as to bring in such pictures for critique, so this
distinction smacks of straw person to me, but as I say, no doubt I
misremembered it, or dreamed it. I personally haven't photographed a
kitten since I was about 12, have never photographed a sunset or a
lighthouse, and while I did show a series of photographs of a fishing
boat, these didn't look like any picture of a fishing boat I've ever
seen, being taken with a wideangle pinhole at fairly long exposure
times; the fishing boat was unrecognizable as such in most of the
pictures. And I've never photographed peppers, although when I was
testing films and developers when I moved to large format, I did do some
test shots of garlic, but never would have considered showing them.
I'm one of the people who usually don't think there are two kinds of
people. But it does seem to me that perhaps there are two kinds of
artists. For both of them, their art is generated by ideas, but the
ideas are of different kinds, being generated by different modes of
cognitive processing. One uses the analytical, verbal-sequential mode of
thinking, the other the instaneous, nonverbal, holistic mode of
thinking. Most people tend toward one or the other of these cognitive
modes; a few are at home in both. Both types of operations are
cognitive by definition, both are conscious and aware, one is not
"better" than the other, but one is mediated sequentially,
incrementally, by language or logical/analytical processes, and the
other is not mediated in such a way but occurs instantaneously,
holistically and nonverbally. I know, in a very definite way, what it is
that I want to express in any given body of work, but I cannot
articulate it verbally, I can only grasp it intuitively and
holistically. That the thought process that produces it isn't verbal or
analytical doesn't, or shouldn't, detract from the work as art.
I wouldn't put the people who photograph sunsets and
kittens, if there are such folks, in either of these categories; I
wouldn't call them artists, or craftpersons either, but something else I
don't have a name at hand for. Sunday photographers, perhaps, to make
them equivalent to Sunday painters.
There's more to say but no more time, so I'll leave it at 2 cents for
the moment, but may add another penny or two later.
Katharine Thayer
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