Male Artist' s Body: National Identity Vs. Identity Politics
Hearty
since the 1960s, in East Central Europe the art of the male body has
had quite a number of adherents.1 There are many relevant examples:
Tibor Hajas, Via Lewandovsky, Petr Tembera, and others. Most of them
were interested in the problem of physical and mental fitness, that is,
the limits of the confrontation between the body and external stimuli.
As usual, the body was defined by these artists not just in terms of
subjectivity (my body), but also as a universal phenomenon (human
body). Sometimes it played a purely instrumental role, functioning as
an almost transparent surface that contrasted with the opaque artist s
"interior".
Ultimately such undertakings reinforced, rather than subverted the
traditional duality of body and soul with its hierarchical order. The
recognition of one s own corporeality was often combined with more
universal conclusions about corporeality as such or the human condition
in general. The process of the corporeal/'psychic'self-recognition was
often expressed in action - through popular happenings and performances
which also epitomized the traditional male role of the active subject.
Paradoxically, the problem of the sexual definition of the male body
was addressed quite rarely, as it was considered predominantly in terms
of the traditional parameters of male sexuality. Thus, in many artistic
presentations the male body confirmed its traditional functions rather
than becoming an instrument of critical practice that would challenge
the social foundations of traditional identity politics. Of course,
that rule allows for certain exceptions, yet the most interesting works
which appeared in this context touched upon the political dimensions of
male body art. Every act of self-recognition, every challenge to
conventions that defied official ideological doctrine and accepted
morals, particularly in those countries where the enclaves of tolerance
were either marginalized or eliminated, acquired a political meaning
that deserves analysis.
The exposure of the nude male body in the art of the recent past
relayed different meanings than that of the female body. In most cases,
the latter was approached under the pressures of heterosexual
eroticization, the dominance of the male gaze, and the proximity of
that gaze to desire and pleasure. Contemporary studies of visual
culture, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, have explored this
problematic quite comprehensively. By contrast, the male body has never
been turned into an object of perception. In classical European
culture, the male body therefore retained its subjective status which
was related to power and heroism, concepts associated with activity and
action rather than with being shown and seen. That order, it is true,
was upset by medieval Christian culture in which, according to Mario
Perniola, the naked body (not only male) was interpreted in terms of
humiliation and degradation, the loss of dignity and the ability to
act. Early modern times, however, returned to the classic valorization
of the body as either the topos of pleasure/ passivity (the female
body), or that of power / activity (the male one).2 Significant changes
in the modern meaning of the male body came only with the rise of the
neo-avant-garde and the cultures of sexual minorities. By
systematically focusing on the male body as a combination of both
elements, artists such as Robert Morris (Waterman Switch, 1965), Robert
Mapplethorpe, or Andy Warhol reversed the relations that existed among
the gaze, desire, and pleasure in classical European culture. The
background of these efforts were the gay margins of culture between the
world wars, while their immediate context was the sexual revolution
after World War II.
In East Central Europe, such a revolution did not occur. There, if at
all, the male body--particularly in official visual culture of the
1950s--was represented in a heroic manner. Usually, it was not stark
naked--the genitals were camouflaged in one way or another.
Conservative and prudish societies of that part of the continent
(perhaps with the exception of the GDR, where the culture of nudism was
quite widespread), rarely allowed for any nudity and would preferred
the attitude of the male heterosexual voyeur to the search for
subversive models of sexual orientation. The Eastern European male
spectator was aroused by naked female bodies in photographs or films.
In fact, such an attitude was not exceptional--his Western counterparts
often reacted in the same way. Amelia Jones has proven that the
postmodern rhetoric of the identity of the female body easily turned
towards the tradition of phallocentrism, dominated by the culture of
the male gaze combining desire and pleasure, which has--in her
opinion--effectively prevented feminists from approaching body art in
terms of identity politics. Paradoxically, feminism--particularly in
its later incarnations of the 1980s--rejected body art as too
vulnerable to the domination of the male gaze. Jones critique, however,
does not turn against the male heterosexual spectator to whom (at least
in this case) she is quite indifferent, but against the inconsistency
of feminism which, in JonesÕs view, all too easily falls into the
traps of the culture which it rejects, and which is overly cautious in
its approach to the truly revolutionary proposals of body art.
This kind of art has been not only radically challenging the Cartesian
idea of the subject but, focusing on the thoroughly subversive
problematic of the subject and its body, it has deconstructed the
metaphysics that has turned the (female) body into an object.3 Yet in
the countries of East Central Europe, where feminist theories and
gender identity politics were developing under the communist regime
without much success (if at all), such practices were particularly
susceptible to phallocentric recuperation. A good example is the work
of the Polish woman artist Natalia LL who would envelop her visual
representations, definitely seen in feminist terms, in a modernist, if
not outright formalist discourse. Her Sztuka konsumpcyjna [Consumer s
Art] from the early 1970s consists of a series of photographs showing
the face of an attractive woman eating a banana or a hot dog in a
manner evidently imitating oral sex, suggesting the experience of
sexual pleasure without the participation of a man. What is more,
contrary to the tradition of sex and gender representation, it is the
man whose status is here reduced to that of a fetish. His fetishization
and deprivation of sexual activity and initiative (he is the passive
provider of sexual pleasure to the woman)--his obvious ironic
objectification by means of trivial consumer goods--can be interpreted
in the context of feminist theory and politics, largely based on
Lacanian psychoanalysis.4 In its ideological and critical aspect,
Natalia LL s work underminines the masculinist representation of woman
and man. Yet, paradoxically, her work is accompanied by theoretical
texts that have nothing to do with the gendered definition of visual
representation or with the subversion of the codes used to represent
the female. In fact, these texts have nothing to do with the female at
all. Rather than to feminism, Natalia LL refers to the discursive
practices of conceptual art, particularly those which, paradoxically,
belong to the formalist tradition of modernist art. This is in fact a
wider problem in East Central Europe where artists routinely combined a
postmodern visuality and poetics with a modernist discourse.5
Regardless of the specific side of the iron curtain, the difference
between the male and female body art consisted in their starting points
- different status of the man and woman in European culture. In the
phallocentric culture, the man is associated with action, hence the
male body art refers to active body; to the body which creates
circumstances itself, while in the female body art the reverse is the
case. Amelia Jones (following Craig Owens) claims that the female body
expresses itself in the "rhetoric of the pose," since because of its
conventional social roles it is passive and acquires its meaning from
the outside. In other words, the meaning of the male body is created,
as it were, immediately; whereas the female body means something only
in relation to the images imposed by the masculinist culture,
conditioning the "existence" of the female only in the perspective of
the "other s" desire. This is the cause of differences both in
strategies and in meanings of body art produced by male and female
artists respectively.6
Yet, the subject matter of my talk is not the female body, but the male
one. The former has been mentioned only to indicate the limits of
tolerance of East Central European societies or, more precisely, the
character of their tolerance, namely, the heterosexual eroticization
and objectification of the female body in the male gaze of the voyeur.
The appearance of the male body causes other problems. Because of an
evidently homophobic orientation of these societies (which is still
quite widespread). The nude artist, performer or sitter shown on a
photograph, in a film as well as in other means of expression,
particularly exposing his genitals, definitely challenged a taboo of
visual culture.
As I have said, in East Central Europe there were relatively many male
artists exploiting their body. Yet, there were only a few who would
turn their sex and gender into a medium of expression - who, to coin a
somewhat paradoxical term, would "genderize" and "sexualize" their
bodies in their artistic practices. In this short paper, I would only
like to mention two completely different artists who used two different
strategies, frames of reference, and - as we will see - ideologies. One
is a Polish artist, Jerzy BereÏ; the other a Romanian, Ion Grigorescu.
To begin with, I will give a short description of some performances of
BereÏ.7 An extremely significant series of events included his
performance Przepowiednia I [Prophecy I] in the Warsaw Foksal Gallery
in 1968, followed by a related Przepowiednia II [Prophecy II],
performed several times in Cracow in 1968-1988, and concluded by
Przepowiednia II spe3nia si [Prophecy II Comes True] shown in 1989 in
Cieszyn. During Prophecy I the artist, with the help of the audience,
dragged to the gallery from a nearby park a fallen tree, and then,
wearing only a red and white piece of canvas, assembled a "work"
crowned with a bow whose red and white string was made from his
"garment." Prophecy II was his response to violent attacks in the
press, which appeared in a very tense political situation early in
March 1968, during mass demonstrations of students and a brutal
anti-semitic campaign of the communist authorities. BereÏ s
performance was actually provoked, as it were, by a journalist of an
influential Warsaw weekly, Kultura, who, under a penname of "Hamilton,"
published preposterous and arrogant feuiletons on various aspects of
modern culture. In the middle of the Cracow Krzysztofory Gallery BereÏ
placed a cartful of timber, and then, once again clad in red and white,
helped by the audience, lighted some fires, using the copies of
Kultura. After a while, he ascended the high pile of timber, made on
its top a huge bow with a red and white string, and next, having asked
for a burning chip from one of the fires, blew off the flame and signed
the whole structure with the word "work," written with the charcoaled
tip. During the final Prophecy, also shown at a turning point in Polish
history, right after signing of the so-called "round table agreement"
which put an end to the decades of the communist monopoly of power
(April 1989), BereÏ, having first repeated some gestures known from
the previous performances, finished his presentation by writing on his
body the words "spe3nia si " ["comes true"] and putting a red and
white dot on his penis.
Another relevant performance of BereÏ was Obraz z Polski [A Picture
from Poland] shown in London in 1988. Its plot was quite simple, yet,
particularly for the foreign (mostly British) audience, it proved very
meaningful. On his naked back, the artist painted red stripes which
looked like traces of flagellation, and then on his torso he painted a
white question mark, completed with a red and white dot on the penis.
Thus, BereÏ asked a question about the sense of Polish suffering for
freedom and national independence, lost after World War II under the
Soviet domination.
In the Prophecies and Picture from Poland the artist called himself
(his body) a "monument". The same motif appeared very distinctly in
another performance called Artist s Monument (Warcino-K pice, 1978).
The artist, wearing a wooden perizonium with an inscription "the artist
s body," with a flag on his arm (with an inscription "the artist s
soul"), pulling a tree trunk like a wheelbarrow, walked a few
kilometers from Warcino to K pice in the north of Poland. Getting to
end of his way, he made a circle with his white paint footprints,
placed there his wheelbarrow, burned in it his perizonium ("the artist
s body"), and put on a long robe (the flag) bearing the inscription
"the artist s soul." One may realize that in all his performances (not
just the ones which I have mentioned) the nude artist seemed to touch
upon two different realms: the politico-historical reality of Poland,
and the problem of the artist involved in history and responsible for
the shape of reality - the past as well as the future - the
artist-prophet.
The national paraphernalia (that is, the colors of the Polish flag)
significantly demonstrated his engagement in the history of the
country. Their connection with the prominent role of the artist as the
one who knows the meaning of history and sacrifice for the sake of
future salvation - the restoration of national independence - referred
to the Polish romantic tradition. In the 19th century, when Poland was
occupied by the three neighboring empires (Russia, Prussia, and
Austria), the artist (usually the poet) created (discovered) the
meaning of history, prophesying that eventually the sacrifice of the
people would bring about salvation, just like the sacrifice of Christ
resulted in the salvation of the humankind. BereÏ consciously referred
to those grand narratives of Polish culture, using their authority in
his confrontation with the usurped authority of the communists. Hence,
the naked body of the artist was a vehicle of authority confirmed not
only by the metaphysical sense of history, whose end would be
salvation, but also by the phallocentrism of European culture which was
referred to in a positive, not a critical sense. The artist's penis,
with a red and white dot, would become a phallus - a symbol of the
authority of genius and prophet, but also of that of culture in
general. It was the source and historical legitimation of resistance
against the communist power.
The body, which was the main medium of the artist's expression and the
realm of the constructed ideology, paradoxically underwent a kind of
"disembodiment," being at the same time a symbol of authority and, like
in the mystical Christian tradition, an expression of the "spirit."
Humiliated and mangled, it died for the "spirit," or the soul to be
reborn. Thus, under the circumstances, the exposure of genitals had an
exclusively symbolic function - it was the phallus, the sign of
authority and spiritual power sanctioned by tradition and the
metaphysical sense of history, opposed to the par excellence material
and usurped authority of the communists. The Romanian artist Ion
Grigorescu, counted by Ileana Pintilie among the "post-happening
generation" and more eager to use photography and film than "live"
action, started from quite different premises.8
I will focus on his two interrelated works: a 1976 film called
Masculine/Feminine and a series of photographs from 1977 (Delivery),
elaborating on the idea of sexual identity. Generally speaking, in both
cases the artist exposed masculine genitals in the positions imitating
childbirth and next to the attributes of womanhood: ovaries and a
coiled umbilical cord. No doubt, Grigorescu posed a problem of sexual
transgression - of feminization of the male body, open to biologically
alien experience. At the same time, however, the sexual difference,
highlighted by taking on the role of the female, was defined in his
images not in terms of biology, but of culture. If, following Amelia
Jones, we assume that in the tradition of European culture the male
body has been associated with action, while the female one with
exposure, adopting a pose superimposed by the phallocentric culture,
then the strategy of the Romanian artist consists precisely in taking
over the position assigned to the woman. The most significant are
neither the natural attributes of womanhood (ovaries and the umbilical
cord), nor the female function (giving birth), but the way the body is
exposed to the camera eye. Simply, the artist posed, made poses, which
has been traditionally (sic) assigned to the female body. A radically
anti-masculinist manifestation of Grigorescu pointed to a conventional
character of sex and gender roles, which implied that the authority was
conventional just as well.
The phallus - a symbol of power - was degraded because its role turned
out changeable and ambiguous, disrupting the functional stability of
power. By the same token, the destabilization of the sexual difference
became politically subversive, indicating conventional legitimation of
every authority, all of a sudden questionable and precarious. In fact,
quite important was the historical context of such art. After a short
period of liberalization in the late sixties, the Romanian dictator
Nicolae Ceau¼escu, called also the "Genius of the Carpathians," in the
early seventies made a distinct move towards strengthening the grip on
social life, while his being "elected" president of the Socialist
Republic of Romania in the middle of the decade was interpreted as the
beginning of the end one of the most authoritarian regimes of East
Central Europe. The police system of control was parallel to extreme
prudery and stabilization of patterns of sexual behavior. Incidentally,
until today Romania has one of the most restrictive laws criminalizing
homosexuality. Under such circumstances, the art of Grigorescu,
revealing sex and gender, their function and meanings, acquired a par
excellence political character. In a conservative society, the very
exposure of the naked male body violated the prevailing norm, while the
merger of phallic and vaginal representation aimed at questioning the
very foundations of the social and political order. What was actually
undermined, was not just the (phallocentric) legitimation of authority,
but the stability of the subject itself which turned out not to be
established once and forever, as a result of some metaphysical verdict,
but negotiable in the context of meanings imposed on sex by various
social practices, including those of visual representation. The
Cartesian cogito was supplanted by a dynamic construct whose meanings
could be defined only by way of constant, endless confrontations. In
the traditional order, sex and gender identity is fixed, allegedly
determined by the biological functions of the body which constitute the
sexual difference and its hierarchical character. In the post-Freudian
psychoanalytic theory, and particularly in the works of Jacques Lacan,
such naturalistic determinism has been questioned, and - as we know -
the sexual difference has been defined in terms of culture. According
to Lacan s commentator, Jacqueline Rose, the anatomical difference does
not translate directly into the sexual one, but is its "figure," a
representative which lets it surface on the level of speech.9 Thus, the
sexual difference is symbolic and cultural, not biological or natural.
The stable, necessary or ultimate character of the construction of
subjectivity is questioned, giving way to a collapse of the hierarchy
of genders.
The identity politics formulated by various minorities, including
feminists, has taken advantage of this chance to develop critical
instruments of analysis aimed at authoritarian social and political
structures. Ion Grigorescu also situated himself in this context -
because of the essentially totalitarian character of the Romanian
regime, his art became particularly radical and subversive. Any
authoritarian system - or its extreme, totalitarianism - can function
safely only with stable and hierarchical social structures whose
foundation seems to be phallocentrism. Therefore all the Stalinist and
post-Stalinist political regimes adopted definitely anti-female
policies, often under the disguise of spectacular gestures: women could
have their own organizations (which were, of course, official and fully
controlled by the central committee of the communist party), or "even"
become high-ranking party and state officials. Perhaps their
paradoxical ally was the traditional conservatism of the societies
under the communist rule - it was paradoxical indeed, since at first
sight tradition appeared to be a perfect antidote to the "proletarian
revolution." Yet, when we take a closer look at the functioning of the
societies of Soviet Europe - reaching beneath the level of class
struggle, state control of the economy, and the transformation of
institutions - we are quite likely to discover that the conservative
models of social behavior, for instance as regards sex, favored the
stability of the system. Hence, questioning the social principles was
actually aimed at the very basis of the totalitarian regime.
BereÏ and Grigorescu adopted two different strategies of resistance -
I have put them together somewhat arbitrarily to illustrate a wide
range of artistic practices and theories of the male body art, as well
as to provoke a question about the critical functions of their art
under the communist regime. No doubt, the very use of the male body and
the exposure of the genitals must have had, in the context of
heterosexual and homophobic societies, a subversive significance. This
is, however, the only link between the Polish and Romanian artist. The
former made references to tradition, to the grand narratives of Polish
culture which is the heritage of romanticism, which became an authority
of the strategy of resistance; the latter, on the contrary, questioned
the traditional sexual politics - the core of conservative society -
suggesting that its destabilization was a radical challenge of the very
essence of power. BereÏ opposed the totalitarian regime with the
authority of tradition - in other words, he pitted one authority and
hierarchy against the other. Grigorescu, in his critical identity
politics, rejected the principle of authority based invariably on
hierarchy; he rejected hierarchy as such, for if it forms the
foundation of all authority, the Romanian artist repudiated the very
principle of authority, opposing it by means of his critical practice
of subversion aimed at its cornerstone. Both the Prophecies of BereÏ
and Masculine/Feminine of Grigorescu were determined by history. They
were created in specific places and at particular moments in time,
although, as it seems, the strategy of the Romanian artist implies a
more general perspective, reaching beyond the local frame of the East
Central European communist regimes.
Let us, however, ask a question about their function now, in the
present context of both countries and the whole former Soviet bloc. Let
us ask about the critical tradition (or traditions) of the present
political debates as they have been determined by art, by different
artistic practices. The answer does not come easy and simple; to a
large extent, it depends on the definition of the present or, more
precisely, the present dangers (ideological, rather than economic)
faced by the post-communist societies. Taking the risk of
oversimplification, I will point to two apparently different perils
haunting not just the post-Soviet, but all Europe: on the one hand, it
is nationalism, with its xenophobia and socio-political obscurantism;
on the other, globalism, with its totalitarian uniformity. These two
dangers are indeed only seemingly contradictory, since one is to a
certain extent an effect of the other. Stuart Hall writes that the
return to the local is often a response to globalization.10 The local
can, however, be expressed in various forms: through nationalism or
through the defense of the identity of margins. Nationalisms can be
more or less closed, more or less defensive, surrounded by the walls
separating them from all the "others." This way goes straight to an
ethnic (or supra-ethnic, religious) fundamentalism. On the contrary,
margins function within the global culture; even though they do not
make its mainstream, they still remain parts of the whole so that their
defense can only take place in the open. One cannot build walls around
them but, on the contrary, develop channels of communication, for only
in such space, in confrontation with the "mainstream," the local can be
successfully defended.
In such a context, identity politics, practiced either for the sake of
nationalism or the margins, may take quite different forms. In the
former case, subjectivity is stable and well-defined; in the latter,
its definition can never be completed, since it is constructed during
permanent confrontation in a channel of communication with its
round-trip traffic between the center and the periphery. This kind of
identity politics is processual and ambivalent, while in the other case
it becomes categorical and unambiguous. The margins are always moving,
for it is impossible to pin down the essence of the relationship
between them and the center. In contrast, national identity is based on
a metaphysical "presence" - it is constructed on the basis of a
well-defined and stable kernel. Now, to return to our examples, it
seems that the art of BereÏ would be closer to the national identity.
Referring to the grand narratives of Polish culture, the romantic myth
of the artist-prophet and the sense of national mission, he did not put
tradition into doubt or propose any kind of critical discourse. Quite
on the contrary, BereÏ explored the national heritage as a source of
authority to criticize the reality of communism. Will this tradition
and its related identity politics match the danger of globalization?
Will it resist the temptation of nationalism, trying to defend the
local against global cultural developments? This is perhaps an open
question which, in addition, brings us to another one: how can we
defend national (and not marginal) cultures against the process of
globalization? Theorizing within the framework of psychoanalysis, one
may assume that the defense of identity put in such terms becomes
possible only if the collective subject (nation, people) has been
defined in confrontation with the outside (inter-national culture), and
not on the basis of some metaphysics of history. This is not, of
course, a case of Jerzy BereÏ. Another open question, however, is
whether global culture is indeed inter-national, that is, if it belongs
to the same paradigm as national culture. If not it means that any
defense of national identity may not be effective, and should be made,
if any, in a different paradigm than the opposition of a national/
inter-national, In such a context, let us take the last look at the
identity politics founded on the deconstruction of sex and gender,
presented in the art of Ion Grigorescu. No doubt, in his case the
definition of subjectivity is both dynamic and, in the first place,
critical.
It seems, then, that the destabilization of authority favors the
margins of the "mainstream." Apparently, permanent tension which
constitutes this strategy gives chances to all minorities trying to
defend their identity. Yet, does this kind of art not imply the danger
of speech which belongs to no one; the threat of dissolving the margin
in generalized theoretical discourse? In other words, does it not -
paradoxically - suggest the danger of recuperation of critical
strategies by globalism? This is, perhaps, the last open question here.
However, feminist, gay, and ethnic (not national) minority cultures,
which create their identity politics in reference to the deconstruction
of the imperial subject, point to distinct places from which they speak
and to specific values which they affirm, formulating a distinct
identity politics. This place seems to be definitely on the margins of
the global imperialism. Consequently, the tradition inherent in the art
of Grigorescu seems to offer a method of criticism which can be used
against the threats of global imperialism and nationalism alike.
by Piotr Piotrowsky
1. Body and the East. From the 1960s. to the Present, ed. Z. Badovinac,
Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 1998.
2. M. Perniola, "Between Clothing and Nudity," in Fragments for a
History of the Human Body, Part II, ed. M. Feher (New York: Zone Books,
1989); cf. also M. Walters, The Male Nude. A New Perspective (New York:
Peddington Press, 1978).
3. A. Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 21 ff.
4. A. Jakubowska, "Kobieta wobec seksualno¦ci - podporz1dkowana,
uwik3ana czy wyzwolona? O kilku aspektach twórczo¦ci Natalii LL z
perspektywy psychoanalizy Lacanowskiej" [Woman and Sexuality -
Submission, Involvement or Liberation? On Some Aspects of the Art of
Natalia LL from a Lacanian Psychoanalytic Perspective], Artium
Quaestiones, No. VIII (Poznañ: Adam Mickiewicz University, 1997).
5. Cf. Nowe zjawiska w polskiej sztuce lat siedemdziesi1tych: teksty,
koncepcje [New Developments in the Polish Art of the Seventies: Texts,
Conceptions], ed. J. Robakowski (Sopot, 1981), pp. 60-73.
6. Jones, 121, 149-50.
7. Cf. Jerzy Bere¦: zwidy, wyrocznie, o3tarze [Jerzy Bere¦: Phantoms,
Oracles, Altars], ed. A Wêcka (Poznañ: Muzeum Narodowe, 1995).
8. I. Pintilie, "The Ulysses Masks. An Introduction to Ion Grigorescu's
Visual Mechanics," paper delivered during the Congress of Kultura Czasu
Prze3omu - To¿samo¦æ Kulturowa Europy 'rodkowo-Wschodniej/Culture
of the Time of Transformation - The Cultural Identity of
Central/Eastern Europe (typescript). Cf. also documentation of the
artist's achievement in Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Bucharest.
9. J. Rose, "Introduction II," in J. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, trans.
J. Rose, eds J. Mitchell and J. Rose (New York: Norton & Company,
1982), 42.
10. S. Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,"
in Culture, Globalization, and the World System. Contemporary
Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. A. D. King
(Binghampton, N.Y.: Macmillan & Dept. of Art and Art History, State
University, 1991).