Nudes

The female nude is a genre deeply rooted in Western art history where there is a prevalent dichotomy marked by the semantic distinction between the concept of “nude” as an act of artistic representation and the carnal, bare “naked”. The feminist revolution, however, objected to this very distinction, challenged the ethical legitimacy of the genre and posed the male passion to consume the naked female body as its latent patriarchal motivation.
Israeli art in the first decade of the 2000s has revealed nude as a dominant genre. The exhibition sets out to present an inkling of this surge of female nude representations, focusing on those created by men—a site which quintessentially represents the ethical problem inherent in it.
What depth currents have given rise to this trend, and what are the preconditions lending it visibility? How are we to read this eclectic cluster of representations? Do the works reproduce and duplicate demeaning patriarchal representations, or do they succeed in demanding a different mode of observation? How are these works related to pornography? What is their status in a society which consumes images of naked women on a regular basis? Can there be a feminist reading of these works?
Rather than introducing a schematic repertoire of answers, a readymade menu of arguments and counterarguments, the exhibition aims to propose guidelines for a possible discussion, inviting viewers to take part in it and make up their own opinions and modes of observation in this controversial field.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Nudes / Ktzia Alon

“What I look at that is visible decides who I am. I am what I can look at. What I admire judges me. … For art can never (even if it wants to) avoid radically ethical choices, since it has very often desired to phenomenalize thoroughly ethical situations. But its inevitable pretension to satisfy and fascinate the look of the spectator implicates it especially in an irremediably ethical intrigue, where it plays with the other person as such as ‘looker.’”
(Jean-Luc Marion)

The female nude is a genre deeply rooted in Western art history. Kenneth Clark’s semantic distinction between the concept of “nude” as an act of artistic representation and the carnal, bare “naked” has become a prevalent dichotomy in that tradition. The feminist revolution, however, challenged this very distinction, posing male passion to consume the naked female body as a latent patriarchal motivation at the core of this genre. John Berger maintained in his renowned book, Ways of Seeing (1972), that “men act, women appear,” thus drawing a categorical distinction between the status of men and women who confront the ontological instance of painting. The gaze of a man, accustomed to observing and mastering the other differs from that of the woman, who learns to lower her gaze coyly, fearing to see, let alone be seen. “A woman must continually watch herself,” says Berger. “She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.”
Ever so prevalent in art, the genre of the female nude was designated one of the most blatant visual means of male oppression, a symbolical act of violation in which artist and viewer share. The militant feminist art of the 1970s onward tied the representation of women to the scarcity of canonical women artists, crying out from the Guerrilla Girls’ posters: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? … Less than 5% of the artists in the Met’s modern art sections were women, but 85% of the nudes were female.”

Referring to the vast European corpus of paintings centered on the female nude, Leah Dovev wrote: “A close scrutiny reveals that the body’s recumbent posture involves mainly considerations of ultimate spectacle aimed at concealing/implying the erotic message. ” She further stresses that the painting is generally created by male artists for male viewers. The female viewer thus finds herself in a problematic position which makes her a partner in the instrumental objectification of the female body. Nevertheless, Dovev indicates the difficulty in applying ethical values to an aesthetic mode, outlining what she dubs “the torn portrait of a female art-lover.”

Israeli art in the first decade of the 2000s has revealed nude as a dominant genre. At the same time, the inundation of art works centered on a “naked woman” is not fully manifested in the museum scene. The exhibition sets out to present an inkling of this surge of female nude representations, focusing on those created by men – a site which quintessentially represents the ethical problem inherent in it.

What depth currents have given rise to this trend, and what are the preconditions lending it visibility? How are we to read this eclectic cluster of representations? Do the works reproduce and duplicate demeaning patriarchal representations, or do they succeed in demanding a different mode of observation? How are these works related to pornography? What is their status in a society which consumes images of naked women on a regular basis? Can there be a feminist reading of these works?

Rather than introducing a schematic repertoire of answers, a readymade menu of arguments and counterarguments, I would like to propose guidelines for a possible discussion, inviting viewers to take part in it and make up their own opinions and modes of observation in this controversial field.

***

The very presence of representations of naked women in the public sphere is not self-evident. The history of Western art recounts a genealogical story commencing with the “sacred” nude in the Greek Temple, continuing through the “sanctified” nude of the Renaissance, where an entire array of camouflage for daring nude paintings was created under mythological titles and reference to that heritage, and concluding with secular nudity, dispossessed of any aura of sanctity and prohibition. The painting mode and modes of representation of the female nude are inseparably bound with the civil status of women in each period and the attitude toward sexuality in general. Openness to the physical is a precondition for the acceptance of nude representations, and their nonclassification as profane or immoral.

In her important book, The Female Nude, Linda Nead maintains that the female nude is the very core of Western art, its icon. It conceals a narcissistic mirror which enables the West to consume itself as enlightened and cultured, furnishing male painters with the great pleasure inherent in domestication of that which is considered the emblem of raw, bestial, passionate nature – the female body – and its transformation into high culture.

The Israeli art historical sphere is distinguished by a distinctive Eurocentric line; it is umbilically linked to the tradition of European painting which is largely dominated by the female nude. According to such reading, the Israeli nude paintings are a symptom of the desire of Europization secretly nestling within them. Moreover, Israel is typified by patriarchal undercurrents, worshiping virility in its diverse manifestations, especially the belligerent ones. We are constantly infused with femininity as a commodity, woman as an object, the object of unrespectful practice.

These two aspects – of self-representation as a subject that has long processed the realm of the erotic and now leisurely revels in it, and of the coveting patriarchal gaze – are immersed in the depth of Israeli nude painting. Beyond these critical claims, however, lie excellent works of art which cannot be reduced to mere ethical parameters.

According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition.” Is it indeed possible to distinguish between the female nude which strikes us from a feminist perspective, and works of art executed by men? Both women and men go through the conflagration, through the catastrophe of the living flesh in its nakedness, a catastrophe which is often extremely beautiful.

Nude painting transforms us into indulgent observers of nudity; partners in “an irremediably ethical intrigue.” We are, however, not mere viewers. We are also the naked woman herself, just as the painter or the photographer is also the woman standing naked before us.

The female nude is also a mode of inverted “self-portrait,” a mode of representation in which the reality is exposed of the man dressed as a woman standing naked before the world. It is an exemplary representation of vulnerability, employing gender reversal for its reinforcement. Thus the naked female body also becomes a metaphor for powerlessness, fear, insecurity, and political vulnerability dialectically existing alongside the explicit overconfidence manifested by the ability to consume nudity indifferently.

“It should be said of all art that, in relation to the percepts or visions they give us, artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound,” Deleuze and Guattari write. The female nude is the point where the most intimate and the most trespassed erupts; an arena which threatens and gratifies us at the same time. The private that has turned public, the physical that has become aesthetic, the static that has transformed into erotic; all these send tiny yet powerful feelers toward our body, thoughts, mind. The nude paintings in the exhibition echo Emmanuel Lévinas’s poetic words: “Erotic nudity is as it were an inverted signification, a signification that signifies falsely, a clarity converted into ardor and night.”

References:
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Books, 1972).
Sara Chinski, “Eyes Wide Shut: The Acquired Albino Syndrome of the Israeli Art Field,” Theory and Criticism 20 (Spring 2002). [Hebrew].
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study un Ideal Form (London: Murray, 1956).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III, and Janis Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).
Leah Dovev, “The Eye and the Body: Discontent in Feminist Aesthetics,” Zmanim 46-47 (Winter 1993). [Hebrew].
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans.: Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer, 1991).
Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans.: Robyn Homer and Vincent Beraud (New York: Fordham UP, 2002).
Linda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992).