Lisa Yuskavage – Upstaging Masculinity and Speaking With the Power of Pretty. Kristeva, Lacan and an Aside That Changes Everything.
Lisa Yuskavage – Upstaging Masculinity
and Speaking With the Power of Pretty. Kristeva, Lacan and an Aside That
Changes Everything.
By xavier_lopez_jr on May
26, 2013 at 8:57 PM
·
Lisa
Yuskavage is one of my all-time most favorite artists–alongside only a handful
of others, I believe that her work attains an almost perfect level of beauty,
horror and grotesquery. Imagine my surprise when a couple of years ago, I
walked into the Seattle Art Museum ad saw that LisaYuskavage was actually part
of the permanent collection. At the same time it appears that her
painting, has only been shown for about six months (to my knowledge) in the
entire time that I have known about it. Now, this isn’t surprising, Seattle
can be amazingly prudish for a supposedly, extremely liberal city.
Yuskavage’s work is amazingly challenging, not just because of the nudity–but
because she takes on and attacks our sensibilities–her work lures us in with
its prettiness and then takes us on an excursion that requires us to step away
from our most cherished assumptions of gender, sexuality and beauty. As
you read the rest of this article, I want you to think and then if you want to
see more of this amazing artist–call or walk in and ask SAM to put up her
painting–so you too can make a decision for yourself about whether Yuskavage is
in fact an amazingly powerful artist who challenges us as she wields the power
of pretty.
the power of pretty
In
the thirties, Jacques Lacan began to be interested in the work of the
Surrealists, during this time much of his writing and theory was both
influenced by and influential to young artists like Andre Breton and Salvador
Dali. As a Surrealist, Lacan’s own theories turned to the internal
workings of the mind and to how desire and psychosis finds its way into imagery
and the artistic object. Because of this, Lacan is the perfect analyst
for modern artists, like Lisa Yuskavage, who, like the Surrealists of the past,
make work that stems from their own internal makeup. When I began this
project, my desire was to pit Jacques Lacan against a modern feminist who also
uses Freud as the basis of her practice. To that end, I chose the
theorist Julia Kristeva. I was unaware, however, that rather than arguing
with Lacan, Kristeva chooses to expand on his basis, but to clarify it in terms
of the female analysand. Ultimately, it was Yuskavage, herself, who
through her own artwork would prove a fit counter to a Freudian analysis which
always places the female as an object of lack.
To
begin with, both Lacan and Kristeva, like proper analysts would be intensely
interested in Yuskavage’s biographical history. They would, however, be
less interested in what she herself thinks her own work is about.
Yuskavage however, is very cagey about her own personal data. From the
various articles I have read, I have been able to piece together that she was
born on May 16th, 1962 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[1]
She graduated with an MFA from Yale University and had her first show in
1989. This is the extent of her biographical information that I have been
able to accumulate, and even in long form interviews she is notoriously silent
about her past. We do know that she was not pregnant as a teen, nor was
she abused while growing up, two issues which a spectator might assume upon viewing
her work.[2]
Ultimately, Yuskavage is much more interested in being thought of as an average
American woman—she never delves into her own ethnicity. Instead, she
prefers that her troubling artwork do the speaking for her.
The
artwork itself has been described as “knowingly dreadful.” [3]
It is at once beautifully ugly. Her horrible, alluring, misshapen,
sexualized, fertilized figures are the types of images that strike anger and
fear into anyone who has fought so that women would not be portrayed as
seemingly helpless objects for the unrestrained, wanton, libidinous, male
gaze. Her work is not easily categorizeable; on the surface she is a
woman who paints women. But, Lisa Yuskavage does so in a quiet, violently
erotic way that seems to taunt the viewer’s sensibilities with images of
rubberized females who flaunt their hypersexual organs. Yuskavage does
not, however mean for us to desire these figures, instead, she paints images
that are meant specifically not to be “easy on the eye.”[4]
Ridiculously large asses and upwardly thrust nipples, cartoonish, round,
nose-less faces with slit-like eyes and mouths are as frightening as they are
compelling. Yuskavage’s females dance in the minefield between the
id and the ego; they seemingly celebrate what she has comically referred to as
the “power of pretty.”[5]
She seemingly does not make work that obviously attempts to correct the
differential power scheme between men and women. Yuskavage does not
rest easily in any of a number of feminisms.
One
series in particular, an ongoing set of paintings begun in 1994 and entitled
“Teen Mom” best describes this problematic. This surrealist, abject
series of oil paintings of seemingly underage, proudly, pregnant ladies,
“Single, isolated figures—always female,” stand against hot pink, nightmare
black or lemon yellow, “essentially abstract, spatially indefinite grounds” of
atmospheric, nebulous color. Yuskavage has branched out within this
self-determined definition to include “multifigure compositions (but)
without overt interaction among the figures.” It is not her intention to
create any overt narrativity.[6]
As
Barry Schwabsky noted in his December 1997 article for Art in America,
Yuskavage’s focus is indeed simply on the picture (the image of the object, Das
Ding.) He adds that, “Reduced to an ideological minimum, a picture must
be a picture of something, and most saliently of someone; [7] but
I wish to add, perhaps no more importantly, but for me, at least, more
interestingly, the picture must be made by someone–And
ultimately for someone as well.
That
someone, in both cases has, of course, historically, ostensibly been
male. From the cave paintings of Lascaux and the Venus of Willendorf,
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to the colonizing images of Gaugin’s Pacific Islander
girlfriend(s), women have been depicted (or in the case of Lascaux,[8] excluded
from depiction) by men–for men. Women have and continue to be
effectively, cut out of this schema, in part described by Lacan and ultimately
reified by Julia Kristeva.
This
“second sex,” as Kristeva calls women, (recalling the idea of the second class
citizen,) are a mute class, alienated from the means of production, in this
case—re-production and re-presentation. Women, under this type of a
schema are all abject, united by the fact that they do not have access to the
phallus. Essentially, and ironically, they do not have access to the
means of producing and of reproducing power.[9]
Whether
we deal with Yuskavage’s figures in paintings or the sculptures that she uses
as models, these are attempts to breathe new life into the fiercely masculinist
surrealist tradition. Originally, the surrealists were a modernist boys’
club, in which dream imagery was used as an excuse to envision all sorts of
masculine misogyny. Strangely, perhaps, Yuskavage does not even attempt
to fight this type of misogynist imagery; instead she chooses to play within
this tradition. Her expectant baby-doll bodies call to mind, easily, Hans
Belmer’s wooden, manipulated poupee. Her arcing, outstretched,
overstretched girls recall a more figural Arp, or even Dali’s better, earlier
work.
Her
figures are often wildly distorted. At times, their small frames become
overpowered by large, obtrusive breasts, usually sporting dagger/phallus-like,
upright nipples. Often nude, these figures fall in and out of gaseous
fields of mauve or orange sherbet fifty-fifty bar dreamscapes, devoid of any
masculine architecture (though strewn marbles and flowers appear with many of
them.) That these figures are meant to be considered in terms of dream
imagery and the unconscious is mirrored in Yuskavage’s own words. “I…think of
the whole business of looking at art as Rorschachian…” she admits, “The
paintings (are often) acting as a shrink for the viewer to have as much
transference as is possible.[10]
Yuskavage
lovingly paints these “babes” as she calls them, as realistically abstracted
torsos. They are often presented to us as armless (Transference Portrait of
my Shrink, 1995), leg-less (Motherfucking Foodeating, 1997), blind (Blonde,
1995) or otherwise unwholesomely un-whole. From a Lacan point of view,
Yuskavage’s imagery is obviously, attempting to deal with the universal
alienation of the self from the body. The fact that her figures break
apart and into the soft-tissue surrounding them is evidence of her own fear and
a sense of falling into the void of fragmentation.[11]
For
Julia Kristeva, however this fragmentation is evidence of comedic horror.
Yuskavage’s images are borne out of the gore and violence of the first moments
of life. That is the separation of the self from the wholesome primary
state of the womb, into the alienating environment of the world.[12]
The fact that Yuskavage’s “Babes” are often pregnant or otherwise filled and
brimming over with life, is no accident to Kristeva. These surrealist,
cinematic images of fragilized females tie neatly into Kristeva’s ideas of
horror—as a reference to the beginning of life and to the recurring menstrual
cycle, that reminds us both of life and ultimately ties the female to the fear
of death.[13]
It is
no coincidence, then, that when Yuskavage speaks of these images, her primary
reference is to cinematic horror:
I like
to think of my characters as “The Brood”… have you seen that movie? It is by
Cronenberg. It is about a woman who is the main suspect in a series of brutal
murders, but her perfect alibi is that she is locked up in a mental hospital,
so (she) couldn’t have done the deeds… Her mother is the first one to get
hacked to pieces and then her husband’s girlfriend, I think, and so on… Then
you find out that her special therapy is producing these creatures, which are
manifestations or personifications of her different neurosis… They then go out
and “heal” her by killing the responsible parties. Cool, huh?[14]
Again
Yuskavage speaks in clinical terms about her artworks. This is
significant because she touches on some important points that both Lacan and
Kristeva would see evident in her work. By Yuskavage’s own admittance and
according to Lacan, her figures must be seen to act as a kind of therapy, in
which she safely works out her own psychoses. However, in other
interviews she claims that the fragmentation and dissolution of the figures is
more specific, more an attempt at poetic symbology. Yuskavage’s own claims
that these “obscured edges” express “fucked up boundary issues,” would be seen
by both analysts as mere sublimation of the terror of the fragmented self.[15]
At its worst, this terror can lead to and is evidenced by–paranoiac
schizophrenia.
It is
important to remember, that, for Lacan, paranoiac schizophrenia is an almost
natural part of the human experience.[16]
In essence, in madness we find a way for the mind to deal with the passions of
being human, it is a time of recuperation and a mirror into the real nature of
reality.[17]
Here, the differences between the self and other dissolve and our relationship
to the other, to reality and to ourselves is radically called into
question. It is possible to see evidence of this breakdown, throughout
her paintings. In the “Teen Mom” series, the differences between subject
and background is never certain, but breaks down often and with little warning.
In
Yuskavage’s case this psychosis, according to Lacan, would of course, have to
be fundamentally feminine in nature. She would be considered a
hysteric. By creating objectifying images in her paintings of women,
often engaged in fetishistic activity in isolation or alienation, she is
attempting to gain information about differing aspects of the same
question. Yuskavage asks over and over again, “what is it to be a
woman?” Each painting then, seen in this way is a record. Each is
the remains of a frustrated, failed effort at reaching the “mystery of
femininity.”
The
only way, in which she can acquire this information, however, is for her to
take a stance in which she must identify with the male. She must take on
an unconscious masculine position and view the female images from this
site. To do this, like Freud’s patient–Dora, Yuskavage must identify at
the level of the ego with the male viewer so that she may study the desire of
the male—in essence to find what it is that men desire in women. Kristeva
points out that, ironically, this activity is dubbed as narcissistic by both
Freud and Lacan.[18]
It is only here, in this schema of desire, and by alienating herself into the
masculine position (an imaginary, phantasmatic act) that according to the Ecole
Freudienne, she can hope to gain an understanding of herself. In fact it
is only from this position that she is capable of representing herself.
According
to Lacan it is a fundamental aspect of the female to imagine herself being
imagined by others. Female desire is a system in which, the woman can
only desire herself when she in turn is desired, her worth is then external,
completely dependent on the desire of the male. Nor is she empowered in
any way, lacking the phallus. Representation, itself is an act of
alienation for the woman, she is represented not for herself or as herself, but
as an erotic representation for the male viewer—always.
According
to Lacan, however this desire for representation is natural, it is inherent in
the female and is made visible through language. However, its enacting
evidence is not natural and is evidence of a neurosis.
Lacan
thus, serves to separate the woman from her own body, through the alienating
effects of linguistic desire and through a fundamental lack in the feminine.
She is never the spectator, except in an imaginary situation in which she
imagines herself being gazed upon by the other, a situation of judgement,
objectification and essentializing abjection.
For
Kristeva, on the other hand, this placement need not be considered neurotic,
but is evidence of Kristeva’s post-liberal feminist understanding of some
fundamental differences between the perceptions and realities of men and
women. Here, Yuskavage’s images of “female” though would still be
considered evidence of narcissism. It is interesting that Yuskavage
speaks of “ultimate transference” Kristeva expands on this idea, which Lacan
dubbed ‘lovehate.’ Traditionally, love, for Freud is bound to the state of
narcissism. For men, narcissus is found in the form of
the other. [19]
The
importance of narcissism for Kristeva, however, is that it is an important aspect
of the subject’s attempting to develop identity and significance, which
“reveals itself as a screen over emptiness.”
Narcissism acts to protect this emptiness, this “gaping hole” from chaos and
the ultimate void of the dissolution of personality and the reality of
symbolization. Yuskavage’s narcissistic images then, act as a membrane of
protection from her own dissolution. As in the Lacanian reading, they are
again, a defense against madness and a kind of therapy for the artist.
It is
interesting to note that Kristeva, like Yuskavage is not interested in undoing
Lacan. Hers is a feminism that has no trouble embracing the image of the
woman as mother, as other, and attempts to come to terms with the idea of
lack. Instead of a site of abjection, the fertile female womb for
Kristeva and others is a place of strength and ultimate jouissance and
difference. This is where Yuskavage must break with Kristeva, as through
her work, she has no intention of fitting in.
This
may be so, but ultimately, Kristeva points out, for Lacan, woman is
unsymbolizeable. His famous statement that “There is no such thing as
Woman,” is something that both Kristeva and Yuskavage cannot neglect. For
Kristeva this is a call to find the ways in which “Woman” can be separated from
the idea of a mythic unity. She sees woman as the base of “the terror of
power and terrorism as the desire for power,” a force for the subversion of the
modernist, masculinist systems of power.[20]
She seeks to undo Lacan, Freud and masculinist language and power from within!
However,
this is a program that is bound to failure. The ultimate breakdown for
Kristeva is that she is ultimately doomed to reify the system of masculinity
that she attempts to subvert. By seeking to find a place of existence she
does so in a system in which she has no voice and that is ultimately
antagonistic to her story. Her breakdown is ultimately tied to that of
Lacan and Freud, as well, because she makes no real break with them.
Instead, she is content to find the areas within their system, in which women
can be made to fit–however uncomfortably. She must ultimately, like
Lacan, make excuses explaining how women like Yuskavage can so seemingly
represent, not only themselves but also the world as they see it!
This
seems to be an unfortunate aspect, perhaps, not just of any Freudian Feminism,
but perhaps any feminism that seeks to make changes from within. It is
the nature of hegemony to allow for its own criticisms, in fact ultimately
opposition strengthens the hegemony, exhausting itself, while continuing the
main power schemas through its need to have something to rail against. If
this is so, then what can be done? How can any oppositional group hope to
make any sort of actual change?
Part of
the answer to this, may in fact lie in the work of the Teen Mom series.
It is seemingly obvious that Yuskavage can and does represent the female, but I
do not wish to come at Freud with an attack so common as sense. Since,
ultimately we are speaking of language, I will deal with both in those
terms. What Yuskavage does in these paintings is similar to what a
Shakespearean character does when addressing the audience–as an aside. In
this particular performative stance, the character is speaking aloud to a
specific audience, while other characters sharing the same stage do not hear
the actor’s words. Yuskavage delivers her words/works as an aside.
They are spoken aloud, to the specific audience of women, and though men
witness this action it is not delivered to them, nor can they hear it.
What
Lisa Yuskavage does is important as it serves to rewrite this playing
field. In performing her artwork as an aside, she takes an active
position and makes art for the specific audience of herself and her other
women. She actively ignores the traditional male audience, forcing them
to stand up-staged or even await their cue behind the curtains. This,
however, is not only evidenced in the art work, even when she speaks, in terms
that are universal, in interviews, her words seek to alienate the male viewer—
“The
original reason I made the images look pubescent is that I always equated the
experience of puberty as everyone’s collective memory of heightened
vulnerability… at least it was for me… and I was hoping to equate that
collective memory of fragility with my own and the painting’s feelings of being
vulnerable to the viewer.”
Ultimately,
by taking the male off center stage, she attempts to change the power
relationship—by actively ignoring it. She actively ignores
the male viewer, speaking past him; the artwork is not made for him, nor is it
about him. She makes the male a voyeur in a system of his own
creation. She simply writes male spectatorship out of the equation.
She effectively castrates the masculine point of view, dealing a blow, which
according to Lacan and Freud, is the primary male fear. If the male
attempts (as he will) to reintegrate himself into this equation, he can only do
so from this castrated point of view. He takes on the role of the peeping
tom, the unwelcomed guest in a trench coat sporting an impotent erectionless
penis.
Finally,
Yuskavage seeks to reintroduce the female to her own body, by making artwork
that denies the male viewer and creates a new surrealistic movement for
women–one that is about the body, her body, your body, and which comes out of
her very personal experiences; erotic, filthy, sexual, fetishistic but
ultimately female.
Because
she actively ignores the male (as a performative act) she is
capable of freely using his imagery, style and media. She simply co-opts
it, to her own ends. As I have noted previously, she casually, even viciously,
uses the language of masculinist surrealism, but she uses it personally, in her
own pink, fluffy way. She shifts the power position and through her, we
see a female dreaming not of being dreamed about, but actively reinvisioning
the female by taking control of the dream.
Works Cited
Harrison,
Charles and Paul Wood. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford:
Blackwell Pub.
1992.
Lacan,
Jacques, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds. Feminine
Sexuality. New
York:
WW Norton & Co. 1982.
Leader,
Darian and Judy Groves. Introducing Lacan. New York: Totem
Books. 1995.
Marcoci,
Roxana, Diana Murphy and Eve Sinaiko, eds. New Art. New York:
Abrams,
1997.
Moi,
Toril. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986.
Schwabsky,
Barry. “Picturehood is Powerful.” Art in America. December
1997:
80-85.
Siegel,
Katy. “Lisa Yuskavage, Marianne Boesky.” Art in America. November 1998:
115-116.
Yuskavage,
Lisa. Interview. Truth. Undated. Internet.
http://www.platform.net/substance/teenmom/truth/05_97/30lisa/lisazero.html
[1] Roxana
Marcoci, Diana Murphy and Eve Sinaiko, eds. New Art. (New
York: Abrams, 1997) 155.
[2] Lisa
Yuskavage. Interview. Truth. (Undated. Internet.)
http://www.platform.net/substance/teenmom/truth/05_97/30lisa/lisazero.html
[3] Barry
Schwabsky. “Picturehood is Powerful,” Art in America.
December 1997: 81
[4] Internet
[5] Internet
[6] Art
in America. 81.
[7] Art
in America. 81-82
[8] I
add Lascaux, because it seems interesting and indeed important to me that the
earliest incident we know of in which men took to representing themselves and
the world they lived in is also the first account we have of the exclusion of
the female from any sort of representation. Of course, some historians
claim that it seems difficult enough for the earliest men to represent
themselves and must fall back on the images of animals to do so, but this does
not negate the fact that in these caves, woman is not seen.
[9] Toril
Moi. The Kristeva Reader. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986) 241-42.
[10] Internet
[11] Charles
Harrison, and Paul Wood. “Powers of Horror.” Art in Theory 1900-1990.
(Oxford: Blackwell
Pub,1992)
1017.
[12] Charles
Harrison, and Paul Wood. “Powers of Horror.” Art in Theory 1900-1990.
(Oxford: Blackwell
Pub,1992)
1015-7.
[13] Kristeva
Reader. 252.
[14] Internet
[15] internet
[16] Charles
Harrison, and Paul Wood. “The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the
I.” Art in
Theory
1900-1990. (Oxford: Blackwell Pub,1992) 609-13.
[17] Here,
I am using the common notion of the meaning of the word reality, with only the
vaguest connections to Lacan’s own theories of the real, reality or the
void.
[18] Kristeva
Reader. 249-55.
[19] Kristeva
Reader, 240.
[20] Kristeva
Reader, 205.
Comments
Post a Comment