‘Genius’ is a concept that now seems rather old-fashioned; it has dropped out of usage somewhat, and even my use of it here is prefaced with this note of apology. It appears to have been superseded by that of ‘celebrity’, which seems correspondingly impossible to avoid. But is there any relation between the two? A visitor from Mars might be forgiven for assuming so; that David and Victoria Beckham, say, are among the most famous people on the planet because they are extraordinarily gifted. But we know better; we know that celebrity is no such guarantee of great ability but is rather a product of our media-saturated society, our thirst for new heroes and that of the market for new brands. What’s more, the very notion of celebrity incorporates an understanding of it as – at least in part – fabricated, phoney, undeserved; while the notion of genius, especially artistic genius, seems entirely different. This speaks, rather, of something genuine, authentic, even unrecognized: thus the popularity of Van Gogh, the epitome of the lonely genius, who sold only one painting in his lifetime, and who shot himself. The myth of Van Gogh is such an enduring one because it is a myth; that is, a story of a kind that we need, because it reassures us both of the truth of art, its authenticity, and of our humanity, in that we can recognize this truth even if Van Gogh’s own contemporaries did not. What, then, of the present celebrity of some contemporary artists – such as Tracey Emin, whose name has acquired a recognizability unprecedented in the history of British art, thanks to the media? There is much, after all, in Emin’s public persona that resembles that of Van Gogh: the importance for both of autobiography, of suffering and violence, the awkwardness of expression, the outrageous behaviour (Van Gogh’s recurrent epilepsy, his self-mutilation, a ‘childlike’ style of painting, his apparent suicide; Emin’s abused childhood, teenage rape, ‘in-your-face’ art, and drunken TV appearances). Yet there have been very few critics to have had a good word to say about Emin’s art, let alone to declare her a genius; indeed, it would seem to most of them naïve and old-fashioned to bestow this accolade on the author of My Bed: ‘charlatan’ would come more readily to mind. Are we then about to repeat the mistake of Van Gogh’s first audiences; is this a hasty judgement on Emin? Why is she a celebrity, if that status is at such odds with critical (and public) estimation of her and her art? Why have artists become such unprecedented celebrities in recent years, and what does this say about the status of the artist in our society?
The search for answers to these questions takes us back, as a starting point, to my observations in the Introduction: that over the course of the 19th century, as commercial values came steadily to encroach over most areas of social life in the societies of the West, artistic creativity came in turn to stand for higher values. It might be added that as reason and organizational logic – what the sociologist Weber called ‘instrumental rationality’ – came to play an increasing role in the pursuit of those commercial ends, that creativity came, in compensation, to be valued less in terms of technical skill than in terms of imagination. The Romantic movement that found representation across all the arts in Europe in the first third of the 19th century was the first embodiment of this, and its hallmark attribute ‘genius’, a term that had previously signified the mastery of technical skill, acquired the connotation of extraordinary access to, and intuitive articulation of, the faculty of imagination. It is worth noting too – for it is a point I shall return to – that as Christine Battersby has shown, in the process of this shift of meaning ‘genius’ acquired the very qualities that had previously been disdained as ‘feminine’, in contrast to the ‘masculine’ values of reason and technical skill. Men could continue to present themselves as more profoundly creative than women: in touch as men with their ‘feminine’ side, whereas women were simply slaves to their irrational natures.
With the consolidation of the market for modern art around the turn of the 20th century, and the emergence of the avant-garde as both a cultural formation and a collective identity for un- or anti-academic artists across the cities of the West, the notion of ‘genius’ gained a strategic role: from being an occasional accolade for supremely (imaginatively) gifted individual artists, it developed into the guarantor of the authority of that avant-garde. Just as it was impossible to imagine an academic artist of genius – so compromised by careerism, dulled by instruction, and limited by protocol would he (and occasionally she) be, by definition – so it was equally by definition that the term encapsulated, to the highest degree, the qualities of free-thinking independence and originality for which the avant-garde saw itself as standing. It was a faith in genius that underwrote the dealer Durand-Ruel’s gamble in buying the entire contents of painter Theodore Rousseau’s studio in 1866. It was a ‘nose’ for genius (and the self-esteem that came with the awareness of having one) that led the discerning collectors of the pre-First World War decade to put their money on young unknowns. And it was the recognition that genius was a quality ‘in the gift of’ the market – a constructed position and disposition – that governed the dealer Kahnweiler’s championing of Picasso’s cubist excesses.
In short, there was a space already created by the cultural aspirations of late 19th-century societies, by the ideology of avantgardism, and by the dynamics of the modern art market for the concept of ‘genius’, a place for it as the keystone of the modernist arch. That Picasso should occupy it, as the presiding genius of his age, was thus not simply a consequence of his possessing unique gifts (although it was important that it should appear to be), but because his particular abilities and ambitions were what were needed then and there, in early 20th-century Paris. His precocious graphic virtuosity, his determination to avoid the easy solutions this afforded him in preference for the expressive rewards of re-inventing a pictorial language from scratch, his personal charisma and sexuality, inventive and mischievous wit, and avant-gardist ambition – the combination of these qualities pre-ordained him as the very type of artist-genius for the new century. He was not, as it happened, the proto type: this had been the sculptor Rodin, whose unorthodox art training, stylistic and technical innovations, and notorious studio habits made him a model for the avant-garde artist a generation before Picasso’s arrival. Rodin had failed the entrance examination for the national Fine Art School three times before being eventually apprenticed to a sculptor of monuments; he distorted human anatomy wildly in his expressive modelling in clay, and introduced the conceit of the incomplete torso; and he required his female models to walk naked around the studio as he captured both those poses he liked and the lascivious imagination of the public. But Picasso was a painter and a sculptor, had a more developed art market at hand, and – perhaps crucially – an appetite for contemporary forms of expression, especially the low humour and disposable wit of commercial culture: music-hall, comics, popular songs, penny newspapers. Such factors gave him far greater expressive and material resources than Rodin enjoyed. By 1914, before his mid-30s, Picasso had established the character of his genius: an amalgam of alchemist, Shakespearean Fool, and satyr that placed his creative imagination at the centre of his art for all but four years of his career, and endowed it with an emotional reach that went from high tragedy to low slapstick.
Those four years were the period in which, with Georges Braque, he fashioned the deep structure and radical vocabulary of a style of painting – christened ‘cubism’ by its critics – whose potential for generating new anatomies and new meanings gave it the status of a model for modernism that I have earlier noted. ‘Braque was my wife’, Picasso famously recalled in later life of their partnership in cubism; Braque’s own preferred metaphor was that of ‘two climbers roped together on a mountain’. Between them these images summarize pithily the combination of sexism, adventure, and machismo that characterized the first-generation avant-gardes – whose progressive, modernist interrogation of prevailing artistic convention was unfortunately routinely accompanied by a regression to pre-modern sexual relations. As Carol Duncan noted 30 years ago, the work of these avant-gardes ‘defines a new artist type: the earthy but poetic male, whose life is organised around his instinctual needs’, and whose art ‘depicts and glorifies what is unique in the life of the artist – his studio, his vanguard friends, his special perceptions of nature, the streets he walked, the cafés he frequented’. In this culture, and this vanguard endeavour, women were not included as equals; with very few exceptions, the roles they could occupy were limited to those of mistress, muse, or manager of their partner’s career. Indeed, as the discourse of modern art was elaborated over most of the 20th century, the exclusion went deeper than behaviour alone. While this self-conscious bohemianism slowly gave way to more ‘bourgeois’ habits as the avant-garde formations became settled and normalized, its masculinism found expression in the aesthetic principles on which most modernist art came to be built. These principles were defined – by artists, critics, and historians – not only as positive qualities but also against alternatives, in what cultural historian Peter Wollen calls ‘a cascade of antinomies’. Thus modernism can be seen, as he suggests, to have privileged the constructive over the decorative (thus, the linear geometries of Picasso’s cubism over the sensuousness of Matisse’s colour); the machine as against the body (‘the house is a machine for living in’, modernist architect Le Corbusier once famously declared); economy over excess; West as against East – in a set of oppositions (others could be added) underpinning which was that of ‘masculine’ as against ‘feminine’. As a result, not only was art by women modernists assumed to be secondary unless (and sometimes even when) it displayed these preferred qualities, but it was at times by definition invisible. Thus, among many others, Sonia Delaunay, a pioneer in the fields of abstract painting, fashion, and graphic design from 1910 to 1970, and Lee Krasner, a painter at the forefront of mid-20th-century New York abstraction, were both until recently sidelined as imitators of Robert Delaunay and Jackson Pollock, their respective husbands. And, to take another example, the desire whose liberation surrealism sought was male desire; as such, it was hardly possible that there could be women surrealists of any importance. This is how it was understood by generations of art historians until recent feminist scholarship demonstrated that, on the contrary, the work of Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun, and others was fundamental for surrealism’s significance. Similarly (and to date more enduringly), the art of the New York School of the mid-20th century has been coloured indelibly as masculine, the emphatic physicality of gesture that characterized much of it decisively underwritten as such by the ‘hard drinking and hard living’ persona that was constructed for Pollock, above all. Tom Wolfe’s account (in The Painted Word, his 1975 lampoon of the postwar art world) of a drunken and naked Pollock urinating in the fireplace at a collector’s party in his honour may be apocryphal, but it became emblematic of a potent myth of the New York midcentury avant-gardist as macho outsider. Yet there were women artists in the Abstract Expressionist movement, not all of them (like Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning) married to its luminaries. One of them, Hedda Sterne, even made it into a photograph published in Life magazine in 1951 of the ‘Irascible Group of Advanced Artists’ (as its caption put it), the only woman in a group including all of the movement’s major figures – and the only one who even now remains an unfamiliar name.
For individual women artists who were faced with a modernism that was defined in terms of ‘masculine’ qualities, by an avantgarde whose behaviour and protocols denied them the space from which to challenge this, there were few alternatives to invisibility. One was masquerade: the performance of a ‘femininity’ that accepted and heightened their difference, but at the cost of surrendering the chance of equality on modernist terms. From the late 19th century, critics had been encountering an upsurge in numbers of women artists that was one expression of the feminism of that time. They met it by constructing a category of ‘feminine art’ whose hallmarks were – of course – sentimentality, domesticity, and charm. Marie Laurencin was the first woman from within the avant-garde formation to make the occupation of this space into a career strategy. From around 1908 she made paintings in pastel pinks, blues, greens, and greys whose languid forms and domestic or poetic-fantasy subjects exaggerated the qualities of ‘feminine art’ almost to the point of parody, and accompanied them with an equally exaggerated feminine persona. ‘If I did not become a cubist painter’, she wrote in later life, ‘it is because I never could. I was not capable of it – but I am passionate about their researches’; and more generally, she declared,
If I feel so far removed from painters it is because they are men … Their discussions, their researches, their genius have always astonished me … the genius of men intimidates me.
Whereas she felt, as she wrote in her memoirs,
perfectly at ease with everything feminine … When I was little I used to love silk threads, I used to steal pearls and coloured cottonreels; I would hide them and look at them when I was alone. I always wanted to have lots of children so that I could comb their hair and put ribbons in it.
The strategy of masquerade worked, after a fashion: critics responded to such simpering with a corresponding gallantry, and Laurencin has come to occupy a distinctive place in histories of the ‘École de Paris’ of the inter-war period. In recent years, postmodern art historians have begun to wonder if the parody was intentional, and to read Laurencin’s art as laced with irony; but if this is so, it is very subtle indeed.
Yet even for women whose aspirations and aesthetic orientation were identical to those of their male contemporaries, the categorization of ‘feminine art’ – the assumption that their art performed their femininity, directly and necessarily – was hard to escape. The American painter Georgia O’Keeffe shared with many artists of her formative years in the 1910s a concern to explore the borderline between figuration and abstraction, that zone of pictorial ambiguity where lines, shapes, and colours hovered between the suggestion of embodied forms and the declaration of their own artifice. For many, including artists as different as Duchamp, Léger, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, this was understandably a first step in a move away from representation that was, for a time, an obligatory undertaking for any self-respecting modernist. Only O’Keeffe’s art was read, by everyone, in gendered terms. A painter friend saw in it her ‘utterly embedded femininity’; a critic wrote of it ‘rendering in her picture of things her body’s subconscious knowledge of itself’. When O’Keeffe, seeking a means of evading such masculinist cliché which was ‘so strange and far removed from what I feel of myself’, turned to real, identifiable flowers as the basis for her pictorial explorations, and played the luscious colours and curves of cana and calla lilies against the self-referentiality of flat washes of paint and subtle contradictions of shape and space – a strategy that has been called ‘abstraction in masquerade’ – the response was even more sexist. Critics constructed from such pictures a reputation for O’Keeffe that still dominates the reception of her art, as the ‘feminine’ artist par excellence: the painter of flowers that represent the vagina. Yet there was no such inference of an utterly embedded masculinity when Marcel Duchamp in 1912 painted Bride and Passage from Virgin to Bride, pictures whose ambiguously visceral forms have distinctly gynaecological associations. Delivered deadpan, his sexual innuendo was read as knowingly ironic rather than driven by deep desires.
Equally deadpan was Duchamp’s playing with masquerade. In a move that was typical both of his impish wit and of the strategic intelligence of the chess-player that he was, in 1920 Duchamp created an alias for himself whom he named Rrose Sélavy. Pronounced ‘éros c’est la vie’ [eros that’s life], this alias served, through its attachment to the titles of a variety of Readymades, as a vehicle for the fascination with sexuality, its charge and its frustrations, that ran through his work. But it also punctured the masculinist pretensions of modernism, delivering a sly but telling kick to the crotch of that ‘earthy and poetic male’ of the standard avant-gardist self-image. Turning himself into a Readymade Duchamp was photographed as Rrose several times by Man Ray in 1921, in one photo dressed in a fur-collared coat and cloche hat with jewellery and make-up, and with an expression that some have likened to that of the Mona Lisa – whose enduring sexual allure he had also subverted two years earlier, in a Readymade in which he added a pencilled moustache and beard to a reproduction of her, and the caption L.H.O.O.Q. (the French pronunciation of which sounds like ‘elle a chaud au cul’ [she’s got a hot arse]). But Rrose is also, in these photographs, distinctly fashionable, and Duchamp’s cross-dressing subversion of femininity said as much about contemporary sexualities as about art history.
And it still does: Rrose continues to have a shadowy presence behind the masquerades constructed by the American artist Cindy Sherman since the late 1970s. Sherman’s earliest work consisted of supposed ‘untitled film stills’, black-and-white photographs of young women seen in a variety of situations: a blonde dressed sexily in sweater and skirt perched on a window-sill and gazing at the scene outside and below (Figure 14); a half-figure view of a smartly dressed woman in a city street looking with apparent anxiety out of the shot; a hitch-hiker with suitcase by a roadside. All have the look of stills from films that are familiar but not quite placeable, and the figure in all of them is Sherman herself. We know this, and yet the women are so different from each other in appearance, dress, and demeanour that it is hard to believe – and it is the tension between that knowledge and this changeable appearance that reveals the constructed nature of female identities and femininities in modern society. Looking for the ‘real’ Cindy Sherman beneath the masquerade is a futile pursuit which nevertheless places clearly in quotation marks the artifice of the various identities she adopts, and in their resemblance to key images from the films of, say, Hitchcock or Doris Day her photo works show up both the devices and the assumptions with which that artifice has been built.
14. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #15 (1978).
Sherman’s subsequent work continued to explore these issues inventively, engaging with art history in a series of wicked parodies of ‘old master’ pictures, and with the disturbing ‘otherness’ of masquerade in a more recent series of clown figures. Those early photographs, however, were charged with the force, unequalled since, of a revitalized women’s movement of whose frontal attack on sexism in all its forms they were a part. That is, it was because of their articulation with that movement in the 1970s, as well as of its widely shared sense of injustice, that these images – like those made by a growing number of women during and since that decade – had and still have such resonance. Equally telling are the photomontages with which another American artist, Barbara Kruger, has since 1980 explored the social construction of femininity. A former art editor at Condé Nast Publications, Kruger has employed the formats of its magazine layouts: declarative slogans, urgent red-banner typefaces, and glossy black-and-white photos, to up-end the very values on which their selling of female sexuality is premised. Again, the force of this work draws on the discourse of women’s liberation as much as it enriches and disseminates this.
Such art helped to advance the cause of feminism through its critical representation of the many ways in which women have been forced to accommodate their sense of self to the demands of a society dominated by men. What’s more, the momentum and breadth of this movement has, in its turn, brought about a fundamental revision both of the image of the artist, and of the cultural spaces within which he or she now functions. This revision has taken three principal forms. First, feminism has compelled a recognition of the work of women artists of the past, which has enriched the inheritance of contemporary artists and offered new models and inspiration for women among them. One of its first landmarks was a sculpture, The Dinner Party (Figure 15), produced collaboratively (as a gesture towards a tradition of women’s cultural practice, and towards an alternative to a perceived masculinist individualism) but under the direction of artist Judy Chicago, between 1974 and 1979, which consisted of a triangular arrangement of dining tables with 39 place settings; each setting named a woman artist or writer of the past (O’Keeffe was the sole living artist included; other figures included the poet Emily Dickinson and the novelist Virginia Woolf) and symbolized her by a ceramic plateful of vagina-shaped forms.
15. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (1979).
It was followed by other work of recuperation in a range of media and registers, including in 1981 an art history book, Old Mistresses by Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, and the following year an exhibition in London’s Whitechapel Gallery of the work of painter Frida Kahlo and photographer Tina Modotti, curated by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. The Whitechapel exhibition brought to unprecedented and deserved prominence, for art audiences in the West (the show travelled to Germany, Sweden, the USA, and Mexico), the highly individual work of two women: both part-Mexican and centrally involved in the post-revolutionary flourishing, in the 1920s and 1930s, of the Mexican avant-garde; both (like so many major women artists of the last century) previously overshadowed by a more famous husband. In Kahlo’s case this was the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera; in Modotti’s, the American photographer Edward Weston. Since the exhibition, Kahlo’s paintings in particular have been the objects of growing veneration, through further exhibitions, books, posters, and films – but this is for reasons that highlight the problems involved in such recuperation of female artists for a canon whose premises are otherwise undisturbed. She had died in 1954 in her early 40s, and could thus be monumentalized in a way that a living artist could not; she had died as a long-term result of horrific injuries, sustained 25 years earlier in a traffic accident, the catastrophic consequences of which for her self-identity as a woman she explored obsessively in her paintings. These paintings were intimate and privately symbolic, yet they also immediately and unmistakeably address themes that others can share: her identity as a woman, and also as a Mexican; bodies, birth, and death; popular and high culture; her relationship with a forceful and unfaithful man. As a result, Kahlo has become not only a cult figure, but one whose grounding in the combination of personal suffering and gender victimization has, it can be argued, functioned not to disturb a modernist canon established on the image of the suffering, heroic artist, but to reinforce it. As much as her experiences and the way she painted them hold out an alternative to a masculinist modernism, they are also the features that entitle her to join its heroes – and have enabled the institutions and protocols of an art world made to safeguard male greatness to annex her work without discomposure.
It was this problem, and the associated ‘essentializing’ of the art of women as necessarily, even unconsciously, indexing their gender, that made The Dinner Party a controversial work among feminists: its insistence upon the relation between the art and the sex of the women it championed appeared, to many, to tie all women’s art into the same biological imperative that had imprisoned O’Keeffe. Yet in its celebration of the bodily dimension of ‘womanhood’ it was typical of an approach to art-making that grew, as the decade unfolded, into a second kind of challenge to contemporary art-making by men. For in contrast both to the hermetic abstraction of formalism and to the theoretical dryness of minimal and conceptual art, many women artists sought to ground their aesthetics in an affirmation of their bodily identity and difference, others in an acknowledgement rather than a denial of lived experience. These concerns in themselves did not distinguish contemporary art by women – Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg were among many male artists who also worked, as the former put it, ‘in the gap between art and life’ – but the momentum of the women’s movement at large (not to speak of its slogan ‘the personal is political’) gave their engagement with themes of autobiography and embodiment a coherence, at times even a programmatic character, that was influential upon a generation of women artists. Such work also had considerable breadth of register. The sculptures that Eva Hesse made before her death at the age of 34 in 1970 shared minimalism’s interest in art’s objecthood and in industrial materials, but joined to these a wry and sensual awareness of the bodily connotations and symbolic potential of such mute objects that laced minimalist seriousness with appealingly low, and gendered, humour (Figure 16).
At the other extreme, Mary Kelly’s complex Post-Partum Document of 1974–9 offered a history of the developing relationship that occurs between a mother and her child that contradicted the dominant representation of this relation as ‘natural’. Combining several kinds of documentation – of her child’s bodily traces and gestures on various materials, from soiled nappies to pencil scribbles; of his feeding regime; of her diary reflections on her experience; of theoretical constructions of subjectivity in the writings of Freud and Lacan – in a visual display that contrasted these in what she called a ‘scripto-visual’ manner, Kelly’s work was ground-breaking both in its subject matter and in its theoretical sophistication.
16. Eva Hesse, Untitled, or Not Yet (1967).
Celebrating the past achievements of women and emphasizing both the social construction of femininity and the bodily dimension of female identity were welcomed, but many felt that these had to go hand-in-hand with challenges to the art world itself. It was in mounting such a challenge on an ideological and historical level that Old Mistresses was most useful. In response to Nochlin’s question ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Parker and Pollock provided a compelling argument that ‘greatness’ has historically been defined as masculine (an argument subsequently developed, as I have shown, by Christine Battersby), and they pointed to the ways in which this had been achieved, through sexist bias in the teaching of art history, in the publication of books on art, and in the curation of exhibitions. Their book gave added momentum to a third way in which feminism challenged art’s practices and spaces. This was the drive by women artists, critics, curators, and art historians, in North America and Europe especially, to scale the walls of the citadel of contemporary art, not just to capture but to dismantle it – a collective campaign whose British dimension Parker and Pollock documented and reviewed six years later in another book, Framing Feminism. As they noted there, the dichotomy between seeking equal recognition with men and challenging a patriarchal art world:
… reflected a similar division in the Women’s Liberation Movement. Should women seek to establish themselves as professionals, or should the trappings of professionalism be rejected in favour of the wholesale recognition as art of whatever women make. On the one hand there was the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union fighting to revolutionise the conditions of professional work, and on the other there were those who felt that in order for skills traditionally associated with women to be recognised and valued, hierarchies – professional/amateur, public/private, fine/decorative arts – had to be demolished.
Over the 15 years documented by Framing Feminism, women pioneered a range of alternative practices of art-making and exhibiting. Feministo, a project of exchanging art through the post, was begun by Kate Walker and Sally Gollop in 1974 as a means of circumventing the difficulties of making art while having young children to raise and no space but the kitchen table to work on. Two years later they had been joined by a dozen others and had made over 200 works on the theme of the artist as housewife and mother. Walker’s knitted wall-piece Art Not Heart/Homemade I’m Afraid and crocheted ‘full English’ breakfast plate of bacon and eggs were examples; others included a Black Magic box containing female body fragments made of chocolate, and a plate of salad with a (papier-mâché) reclining female nude in place of the slice of ham. The works were shown in galleries around Britain, including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.
Another strategy, and type of art, was performance. Often a more immediate means of artistic communication, performance art drew on popular culture traditions as well as that of avant-garde movements such as Dada, futurism, and the ‘Happenings’ of New York artists, and could, as in New York-based Carolee Schneemann’s performances, use the body as a symbol and a resource – ‘a stripped-down, undecorated human object’, as she put it. Or, like Susan Hiller’s Street Ceremonies and Dream Mapping works of 1973–4 in London, it could engage large numbers of spectators in participatory events. Through the next decade performance grew so rapidly in scope and in the number of feminist artists performing that Parker and Pollock noted in 1987: ‘today it would be the rare feminist art show which did not include a performance section’. Also, exhibitions were held in non-art venues: in libraries, disused factories or warehouses, children’s nurseries, derelict houses; initially used from necessity, such spaces were increasingly sought out as a means of avoiding the institutional associations of galleries. But it became clear that such alternative venues risked marginalization, and protests were staged against the exclusion of women from major art survey shows, in New York at the 1970 Whitney Annual, and subsequently in Los Angeles, Washington, and the Hayward Annual in London. At the same time all-women galleries such as AIR in New York afforded some redress of the gender imbalance of such surveys. By 1980 these strategies had begun to reap rewards: that autumn the ICA held three consecutive major all-women, overtly feminist exhibitions.
It is clear from the vantage point of the present, however, that by the time that Framing Feminism appeared, the women’s art movement, like militant feminism at large, had passed the peak of its momentum. While this anthology of the textual (and mostly ephemeral) residues of its campaigns demonstrated its richness and diversity, the fact that it was published at that moment suggests a need to take stock at a time when the neo-liberal politics of an ascendant Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the USA were turning the cultural tide, and there is a note of fond farewell in its introductory surveys, alongside the underlining of the movement’s gains. These gains were real and lasting: it is now impossible to conceive of contemporary art practice without the substantial presence of women, and the art schools of the Western world are producing female and male graduates in equal numbers. The macho male outsider in the Pollock mode is now as obsolete a model for the modern artist as the alchemist-fool-satyr genius that was Picasso, thanks largely to the challenge of feminism.
Moreover, its example has opened the way for other underrepresented groups to challenge the white/Western model of the artist. In ways that we shall explore later, postcolonialism and the politics of sexuality have contributed to present and continuing realignments in the image and practices of modern art. But obstacles to such progress remain, and feminism has met some setbacks. In the art world, as in society at large, power structures and relations remain much as before: male dealers call the shots in the market; most art prizes still go to men; women remain in a minority in top curatorial positions, as in the public and private sectors of the economy as a whole. Feminist art has been assimilated, often through the agency of sympathetic curators, but into a museum culture that instantly deradicalizes its sexual politics and re-stages this as spectacle (the sculptures by Louise Bourgeois with which Tate Modern inaugurated its Turbine Hall exhibitions programme in 2000 were a case in point). A younger generation of women artists take the achievements of their counterparts of the 1970s as much for granted as self-styled ‘post-feminist’ young women do in general.
Which returns us to Tracey Emin. For this is one dimension of the context within which we must place her work if we are to answer the questions I posed at the start of this chapter. Emin and other female members of the ‘yBa’ stable, Sarah Lucas most prominent among them, have acquired a reputation as ‘ladettes’ in current parlance: their brash, sexually explicit art and immoderate public behaviour are taken as equivalent, in a way that was not previously open to young women, to the pushy vulgarity more commonly associated with young, mostly working-class men; Lucas’s ‘self-portrait’, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, which features these objects so arranged on a plain table as to suggest her breasts and genitals, mocking the reclining nude of high art with the crudeness of toilet graffiti, is representative. But Emin’s work, while sharing some of these qualities, also makes implicit reference to feminist precedents, as well as other avant-gardist ones. Her quilted, embroidered, and appliquéd blankets with their angry, desperate confessional declarations look back to the tradition of women’s craft activities, and to the example of Frida Kahlo’s autobiographical, populist symbolism and style. Such works affectingly, but also knowingly, restage Kahlo’s manner and her suffering persona in the contemporary idiom of street and fashion-magazine graphics or political murals. In another register, her now notorious tent with appliquéd lettering, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963–1995 (1995), now equally notoriously destroyed by fire, played with the viewer’s assumptions of her promiscuity in her inclusion of the names of two aborted foetuses, her twin baby brother, and other family members in its roster of sleeping partners. Knowing that ‘we’ would read it as a declaration of her sexual prowess, Emin suggested with these inclusions that the work has, in truth, more to do with the intimacy of shared sleep than that of shared sex. The irony of this does not centre only on confounding clichéd and sexist assumptions about loose women, however. It also plays with her own celebrity status, and with the persona of ‘bad girl’ that she has been complicit with the media in constructing for herself. Emin addresses this theme of artist-as-celebrity with a reflexiveness and premeditation for which she is rarely credited, drawing – as in her acknowledgement of feminism – on previous instances of it as a resource, weaving her reprisal of these into the ambiguities of her own work.
The phenomenon of ‘celebrity’ is a product of the mass media. In addition to the name recognition that is the criterion of ‘fame’, it implies a mediated closeness to an audience, the illusion of which is dependent upon the ubiquity of the reach of images of the famous into our daily social environment. While there have been celebrities for as long as there has been a press with such a reach – which means at least since the mid-19th century (when, incidentally, the term was coined) – it is the postwar saturation of social life achieved by a proliferating mass media, led by television, that has given ‘celebrity’ the meaning and lustre that it has today. It is therefore no coincidence that artists first became celebrities in the contemporary sense in the mid-20th-century USA. Jackson Pollock was the prototype: while his career peaked before modern media saturation was achieved, he was the first modern artist to be given wide publicity in the popular press even before his avant-garde reputation had been secured. It was primarily Life magazine that turned Pollock into a household name; pursuing a policy of closing what it called ‘the chasm between artists and democratic society’. In October 1948 it published an illustrated account of a ‘Round Table on Modern Art’ it had organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which Pollock took star billing as representative of that art’s most extreme tendencies. A year later Life devoted a photo-spread article to him entitled ‘Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’. Far from containing the ‘knocking copy’ that conventionally lampoons avant-garde art in the popular press, these articles were respectful, even sympathetic, and in thus singling him out for serious attention they gave his name a currency and a cachet in the media that were soon capitalized on by others; Cecil Beaton’s 1950 Vogue photo-shoot, which I’ve already mentioned, clearly depended heavily on both.
Pollock’s celebrity was both unsought (though not, it appears, regretted) by him, and entirely external to his art practice. Andy Warhol’s celebrity was the reverse in both respects. Warhol had always sought fame, for the usual reasons that many people do, from the start of his career as a graphic artist, and apparently turned from shoe illustration to painting because of the greater acclaim it seemed to promise. But he had been obsessed with celebrities even from childhood, and his adoption of celebrity itself as a central theme of his art was in keeping with this overheated fascination. It was not only a matter of choosing celebrities as subjects, as in the Marilyn, Liz, and Jackie silkscreens that marked his rise to fame in the mid-1960s, but of playing with the mechanisms and trappings of celebrity status as well. He parodied the Hollywood studio system by developing his own group of ‘stars’ from his circle of friends and upping the ante by designating them ‘superstars’ – only these, as cultural historian John Walker noted, were a motley bunch of social misfits who, unlike stars under contract in Hollywood, were ‘unpaid, untrained, undirected and eventually unemployed’. He screened the films they appeared in at mixed-media events, and recruited a rock band, the Velvet Underground, to play at these; the band’s own subsequent fame fed into Warhol’s reputation as a ‘supercelebrity’, not only someone celebrated in his own right but a manipulator of celebrity itself as if it were an art material. The manipulation was conducted in several dimensions. Continuing his fascination with stardom, he turned his social life into an art practice, documenting with camera and tape recorder his every phone call and conversation, founding a magazine, Interview, in 1969 as a vehicle for glamorous photos of film stars and other celebrities. His own appearance, like that of the several transvestites and drag queens in his entourage, was an endless masquerade: heavy make-up and an array of wigs (he owned 50 in the 1980s) helped him, as some have noted, to express in his own person ‘the close connection between beautification, reinvention, transformation and drag’. Behind these various personae – behind all of his artworks – was, he seemed at pains to imply, not an inner self but a mirror. Yet while this clearly subverted the conventional image of the artist as unique, creative, and original, it did so with an effectiveness that left the public in serious doubt of its strategic character. While the subversion required that the blank, reflective, glamorous façade be always kept in place, there remained little room for a sense of his irony, his distance from his image, to gain a foothold. In the end, Warhol’s celebrity was less a theme of his art than the real artwork itself; but it is the ambiguity of his investment in it, more than the work, that has continued to intrigue.
Other modern artists have invested in celebrity in different ways. The German artist Joseph Beuys did so by adopting the persona of a ‘shaman’ – cloaking himself in a quasi-magical aura of mystery that was grounded in a much-recounted account of his having been saved, when shot down over the Crimea as a Luftwaffe pilot in World War Two, by tribesmen who smothered him with animal fat and wrapped him in felt (the two materials featured frequently in his work). The mystery was enhanced by suggestions of a special affinity with animals, as in his 1974 piece I Like America and America Likes Me, in which he cohabited with a coyote in a New York gallery for three days, wrapped throughout this time in a felt blanket. The British artistic duo Gilbert and George cultivated celebrity from the start of their career through an idiosyncratic persona and behaviour – each initially refusing to be identified either as ‘Gilbert’ or as ‘George’ (this pose was later abandoned), and presenting themselves as ‘sculptures’ rather than ‘sculptors’ (their early pieces were performance works for which they dressed in identical tweed suits and painted their faces gold). In the 1980s, the celebrity that this reputation for idiosyncrasy acquired for them was consolidated by notoriety gained from a number of high-finish photo-works combining images of urban youths with racist and homophobic graffiti; the ‘frisson’ of this glossily packaged juxtaposition of tweedy reticence and street violence proved irresistible to the art (and wider) press, and secured for them the art stardom they enjoy today.
Perhaps more than any other contemporary artist, Tracey Emin has come to stand in Warhol’s footsteps, occupying the space of artist-celebrity that he carved out for himself, but also developing it in significant respects. Like Warhol, Emin appears to use ambiguity as a strategy. In the consistently autobiographical focus of her art and the intensity of its character, with its unflinching exposure of a painful past; in her combination of graphic work (mostly monoprints) that seems both in style and in subject matter as untutored, scratchy, and crude as toilet graffiti with an equally artless use of the public media of video and photography; in her accompaniment of this work with readiness to model in fashion magazines, to sponsor products, to appear on TV quiz shows – in all of this her work gives a first impression of a self-absorption, clamour for attention, and desire to shock that are naïve and even childish. As such, it seems unmediated, unpremeditated, authentic, yet of questionable quality, as most of the press – art critics and tabloid journalists alike – appear to have concluded. Yet it is also not only ‘knowing’, as I have suggested, but steeped in self-conscious cultural references. Many of these are to art history: not only to Schiele but also Edvard Munch whose Nordic self-absorption Emin obliquely reprises; to Vladimir Tatlin, whose ambitious and Utopian construction Monument to the Third International of 1920 (Figure 5) she parodied in her 2001 ‘helter-skelter’ piece Self-Portrait (Plate IV); to the sexually explicit painting of 19th-century avant-garde patriarch Gustave Courbet; to the conceptual art of the 1970s and 1980s. Others are to popular and commercial culture: to Vivienne Westwood, whose clothes she models and wears – indeed, cultural historian Ulrich Lehmann has suggested that Emin is the Westwood of the art world as Westwood is the Emin of the fashion industry, in that ‘both are seen as subjectively irrational, emotionally bare – and therefore very feminine – and each as the sexually liberated “wild child” of their respective generations’. Moreover, in several works Emin shows clearly not only her awareness of her celebrity, but – again reprising Warhol – its role as a ‘material’: thus I’ve Got It All of 2000, an ink-jet photographic print (a medium with distinctly non-art connotations) of herself seated, dressed in a low-bodiced minidress, legs splayed out either side of the lens, stuffing a huge pile of banknotes and coins into her apparently knickerless crotch. Image and title interact here punningly to lay bare the sexual and pecuniary implications of this self-portrait of the well-endowed artist.
Thus Emin’s work both is and is not what it appears at first sight to be. It is all those things ‘we’ see on first impression, but it is also the reputation that inescapably accompanies each exhibition of it, brought by its audiences, as well as the mechanisms – above all, of ‘celebrity’ – by which that reputation is produced and sustained. Her complicity with these mechanisms, and with the media industry that drives them, can perhaps be likened to that of a lion tamer putting his (or her) head in the mouth of a circus lion. Both are dangerous tricks to perform, if in each case necessary if the audience is going to keep its eyes on the act. If the one risks losing his (or her) head, the other risks losing the critical independence, that purchase on alternative circuits of meaning to that of the dominant, which has been the life-blood of modern art. The question is, how hungry is the lion? How voracious is the media industry? What have the audience paid to see?
