The gaze and the politics of representation

Art (and that can include movies and theatre) creates a virtual space where we play out constraints and taboos that we don’t normally or comfortably deal with in public. The work creates a force-field, in which scenes are represented for a spectator to interact with. A lot of conventional art and mainstream cultural practices flatter the viewer, their world views and fantasies. Artists that subvert the usual structure – think of Cindy Sherman, Julie Rrap, Anne Ferran, Juan Davila or Tracey Moffatt – offer challenges that tend to play fast and loose with our cultural expectations but create new and multiple pathways that may challenge, thwart, fascinate or even punish our usual reactions.

There are mixed signals in a Vanessa Beecroft performance, a passive-aggressive quality that comes from being ambushed by a spectacle of beautiful women naked in a public space. The physical immediacy of the models combined with the accessibility to your gaze seems contradicted by their psychological unavailability. The cool context of an art gallery, unlike that of a peepshow, for example, also seems to empty the viewer of desire. The deadpan return of the gaze by Beecroft’s women, and the fact that they are part of a long performance in which nothing much seems to happen, can make an audience present themselves as other than they are, thus what they are allowed to see is not what they may want to see.

Or to put it another way, the experience of the performance over several hours is very different from the impression you might get from seeing Beecroft’s work from photographs in a book. In a performance, the models seem to be in their own world, aloof from the territory that the viewer is inhabiting. In a book, they are more at the mercy of our gaze, more private and therefore more erotic. The distance imposed by Beecroft seems to refrigerate desire to a certain extent and it has something to do with the way the bodies seem hyper-real in their resemblance to mannequins or simulacra. There is also the way power seems to shift between the viewers and the viewed.

This uneasy difference between these two modes of looking, between seeing them as real and seeing them as art or as image, has been explored over the last 30 or so years in feminist critiques on the regimes of viewing in visual arts. Laura Mulvey’s criticism of gender representation in traditional Hollywood film (‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in the journal Screen, vol 16 no 3, pp 6–18) is one example, in which she argues that those movies reinforce the socially established interpretations of sexual differences that control images, especially erotic ones, in the ‘society of the spectacle’. This analysis of voyeurism, of the gaze and of the politics of representation connects with issues such as sexual objectification and scopophilia (the sexual pleasure derived from looking), and draws heavily on that great thinker of human complexity, Sigmund Freud, and his followers, like Jacques Lacan. In Freud, the human subject is shown to be dramatically divided and internally contradictory, because of the powerfully loaded primary socialisation that takes place in the nuclear family, which itself is implicated in the story of how we are taught to behave, to look, to speak and all the mechanisms for our becoming part of the culture at large. Through Freudian analysis, we can understand more about our subjective reactions to things that take us out of our comfort zone – like Vanessa Beecroft performances, or scenes in movies – which we may find freaky or disgusting, or intense and pleasurable.