Returning the Favor: Man as Art Object, Sex Object

By EMILY VILLANO

November 26, 2011

In her 1972 Women’s Art: A Manifesto, performance artist Valie Export writes, “man has defined the image of woman for both man and woman…the arts can be understood as a medium of our self-definition.” Within broader efforts to oppose the male-constructed conception of women, and to reclaim the autonomy and dignity of the female form, art became a crucial battleground in the Women’s Liberation movement. Feminist art provided women with the space to construct images of themselves for themselves, and subvert the repressive, dominant ideology.

Yet while much of feminist art succeeded in reconstituting the “image of the woman,” little effort has been made to examine, in turn, the image of the man. Now, an art exhibit showing at SOMArts through November 30, and moving to the Kinsey Institute in the Spring, attempts just that. Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze features the works of 117 women artists, inverting the traditional gender hierarchy of subject and object within art.

Much of the conceptual legwork in the exhibit is achieved by placing males in positions, settings, or reductionist angles usually reserved for women: naked men at the stove; circumscribed images of male genitalia and buttocks; a heavily powdered and rouged portrait of George Washington; men barely-clad in exoticized female dress; in ads for shaving cream and perfume. These pieces comment most directly on the nature of femininity, often in cheeky and humorous ways. Photographer Karen Zack displays men in pin-up girl poses and demands, “When did the word ‘feminine’ become a code word for sexual objectification?” Laura Hartford’s gently reclining, garlanded or soft-eyed men, mock feminine ideals of passivity and delicacy. If we can’t take the men in these images seriously, why do we normalize women in the very same positions?

An equal share of the exhibit, or perhaps more, explores the concept of masculinity. Here, the male phallus takes center stage. Some exaggerate and poke fun at the penis’s mythic proportion, bearer of virility and strength, such as Priscilla Otani’s Adoration in the Steroid Era, which constructs male genitalia out of two baseballs and a bat. Others, such as Michelle Lopez’s Male Nudes, lay bare the penis with frank, up-close imagery, demythologizing masculinity itself. An abundance of pieces depicting male masturbation perhaps comment on the enslavement of men to their own masculine ideals, their self-stroking self-delusion of inflated male importance.

In the exhibit catalog, painter Janie Cohen asks, “Are the men depicted in my art fantasizing about women, or are the men objects themselves at which the female will gaze?” Significantly, this remains a question. The pieces in this exhibit may draw attention to traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity, and certainly ridicules the objectification of women, but it’s unclear whether it succeeds in reconstituting gender roles and objectifying men. Indeed, it may be that this exhibit says less about “man as object” and more about the female “gaze.”

Feminist artists of Export’s generation sought to create an interactive, “lateral” art that eliminated supposedly male hierarchies between subject and object, artist and viewer. Perhaps a feminine gaze is one that does not objectify, but sees, levels. This appears in the exhibit sometimes explicitly, as when Corinne Greenberg describes her interaction with her models, “The gaze was a two-way street, a synergy where we encouraged each other with words and without.” Shilo McCabe writes of her art, “My gaze does not consume and dominate; it is not threatening in the way that a traditional male gaze can be.” Or, elsewhere, implicitly. Tristan Shane’s photograph, Dex Hardlove, places viewer and artist on equal planes by including a camera in the picture frame. In Morning News, painter Lynda Reyes takes the perspective of a wife gazing at her husband across the table, equalizing the plane between artist and model, man and woman.

May Wilson’s piece Untitled, pictured left, recalls us to Export’s 1989 fractured Self Portrait. Wilson collaged together images of gay male pornography by superimposing snowflake-style cutouts of one on the other. As the Export piece plays with the exaggeration and diminution of the female face, here Wilson alternates concealing and revealing the male body. Both contrast the steadiness and apparent symmetry of geometric patterns with the realities they distort. Similarly, the gender norms of our society are unsettled when confronted with their distortions, what they emphasize and what they obscure. By bringing those confrontations into relief, this exhibit makes an important contribution to discourses of objectification and gender-construction, ultimately calling for a more nuanced approach to the image of both the female and the male.

Emily Villano is a junior in Yale College.  She is an associate editor for Broad Recognition.