Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match circa 1784-6
Oil on canvas
support: 1039 x 1500 x 20 mm frame: 1235 x 1695 x 85 mm painting
Summer time, Jackson Pollock
Lee Krasner, Gothic Landscape.Feminist inquiry being to: read beyond painting as discrete aesthetic objects and interrogate ‘that expanded set of relations of making and viewing, seeing and reading that the term artistic tries to encompass.’
The founding essay in cultural anthropology by Clifford Geertz ( Deep play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, 1973) is used as a focus point for the development of the inquiry, alongside Johanm Zoffany’s ‘ Coonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, 1784, and the work of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
Using the presence ( / absence) of Lee Krasner in Namuth’s film documenting Jackson Pollock, Griselda Pollock looks to go beyond merely noting the marginalisation of the feminine within the binaries; centre / periphery; masculine/ feminine; coloniser/ colonised.
The space for the production / process of sexual / cultural differencing is not the iconographic or compositional content within the image – it lies in the psycho- symbolic relation in which the work of the painting is engaged with by the work in the space / act of viewing.
Zoffany’s painting encodes the staging of a spectacle complete with spectator.
‘Difference is not attribute but relation; difference is not essence but play’ (in ref to Derrida)
Homi Bhabha’s double movement of governmentality highlights that it is not merely sexual difference alone that can be bought into play within this discourse. We must ‘grasp that the body is ‘always simultaneously inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.’ The play between sexual and cultural difference exists within the constructions of governmentality and desire.
The mixed economy of power and desire can be tracked in reference to ‘Colonel’s Mordaunt’s Cock Match’ and ‘Summertime’ via two pathways:
1.Gesture – as a point of comparison.
2.Consideration of the painting as text ( as staging of meanings that imply and create relations between the represented bodies and the viewing subjects, at a level beyond iconography or social decoding)
‘Paintings actively perform something on behalf of the culture that produces them.’
similarly to theatre, in which ‘thoughts are structured by narratives, performed by bodies adopting the body as the means for the evocation of deeply structured associations that inflect the formally articulated meanings’.
‘the body evokes structured associations that inflect formally articulated meanings.’
Gesture in relation to theatrical performance: 'theatrical performance changes the viewer through the play of dramatic emotions and a sequence of signifying gestures that the viewer not only sees but indentifies with in her / his own embodies person.’
‘representation has the making and remaking of subjectivity.’
Definition of subjectivity: not private and exclusive but is constantly being fashioned and reworked by encounter with representation and language through cultural practices.
Visual representation dramatises and produces issues concerning self perception and identity, as well as ideas relating to social life and conflicts.
Cultural representations of sexuality and sexual difference are never far from the relations of power, domination and discourse.
Study of the practices (gestures) of abstract painting in their aesthetic and material specificity can enable ‘a fluid and productive reading of fixing of identity and gender to artists as ‘men’ and ‘women’.’
Why were women marginalised from the movement of American Modernism?
Relativity to the era- shift in sexual difference, from the wartime working woman to the idealised homemakers of the 1950s.
Consideration of ‘the play of subjectivity through the privileging of the gesture’ with the gesture as an ‘index of both an embodiment and a psycho-sexual subjectivity, neither of which are synonymous with anatomies or socially specified genders.’
Proposition of two questions:
1.Is the gesture male?
Based upon the idea of Pollock’s drip paintings as the ‘metaphorics of masculinity’
Gesture (manner of painting and movement of bodily ego) ― fantasmatic subjectivity
Gesture should not be read as an index of what our culture already projects as typical gender characteristics of masculine and feminine behaviour or psychology.
What aspects of the differences between the fantasy worlds of sexual difference might be revealed through the art practical specificities of New York Modernism?
‘Instead of typical oppositions of phallic masculine aggressivity and smooth flowing feminine passivity, signalled by two methods of painting, the drip and the stain, I pondered what of feminine violence, anxiety, sadism, envy and desire?... How will these forces find gestures that can encompass and translate their inchoate formless pulse into visibility through an art work?’
2.Is the artist hysterical?
The hysteric: posing a radical doubt about the fixities of socially sanctioned sexual identity. The hysteric asks: "Am I a Man or a Women?", "Am I alive or dead?"
hysterical = capable of identifying across assigned bodily and linguistic gender.
Therefore,' if the artist is hysterical, creativity might be seen to stem from indentifications that transend the actual gendered embodiment of the artist.'
In order for the female to be an artist, rather than a mother, she must move away from the constructions of the femine child, culturally encouraged to identify with the mother, and identify with the masculine position of the son / artist, the patriarchal culture alone defines as Artist.
Cross gender accessibility - perhaps a key to creativity (working from greater understanding and experience of the world). New artistic forms can be created through the actions of the woman as artist.
'The femininity of the artist and the fantasy of the maternal sublimated within creative activity would be articulated through new artistic forms.'
'The point is to expose the fluidity of unconscious indentifications and relieve the apparent fixity of given social gender so as to reveal artistic practice as the site of both the ideological production of sexual difference as a set of oppositions (male/female) and as the perpetual erosion of fixed identities.'
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A painting, producing itself to be read as a (re)staging is both productive and transformative for the producer and the viewer that reads it.
How do Summertime and Colonel Mordaunt's Cockmatch relate to each other?
'Deep play: notes on a Balinese Cockfight' by Clifford Geertz allows us to read culture as a symbolic staging enactment, choreography of both sexual difference and social heirachy. Consideration of game play as a form of cultural conditioning: with cultural and social significance made apparent in forms of game play (ie. cockfighting)
- consideration of the similarities between male and female behaviour
'cocks can thus become both the real and the metaphorical signification of the masculine self.'
'the cockfight, especially the deep cockfight is fundamentaly a dramatization of status.' (Geertz)
'The fights cause daily humiliation and triumph without actually shifting anyone's real status.'- everyday experience / cultural meaning becomes more powerfully articulated through the cockfight.
'The event is thus image, metaphor, and fiction that allows what is shown, or what takes place, to represent for the masculine participants the social passions and tensions through blood, feathers and money.'
Tensions in social status that are normally obscured become visible in an aesthetic and kinetic form.
'The dramatic metaphor captures, better than the usual notions of the passively consumed visual image, the experience of 'sentimental, that is emotional and psychological, education, that is coming to some kind of knowledge'.' - the act reveals half-known, hidden inner knowledge through experience of the sentimental.
'art forms gnerate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display.'
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