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Whose
Beauty?
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What I am going to try and talk about today, often in
the form of questions, stands at the meeting point of the
properties of physical matter and an elaboration of sexualized
subjective identity that has still to be thought through and put
into practice.
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This
statement by Luce Irigaray could indicate a discussion in a woman
artist's studio. We could be contemplating her practice. We could
be at the site - the meeting point of the properties of physical
matter and an elaboration of sexualized subjective identity-of her
enunciation through that practice. This essay explores the
implications oflrigaray's discussion of the concept
"beauty" for that site. Her writings indicate moments
ofstrategic or structural possibility from which women can create
beauties appropriate to their subjectivities, and outline how
becoming subjects, women, and mediating the resultant subjectivity
is in itself to create beauty. Although in Western culture the
Symbolic has a phallocentric syntax and what is read as beauty of
body and beauty in art are products of phallo-centric structures,2
nonetheless moments of resistance and
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disruption can be discerned
in contemporary artworks by women. It is against the back-drop of
Irigaray's reconfiguring of "beauty" that I discuss some
of these works.
Whose "Beauty"?
Luce Irigaray's essay "How Can We Create Our
Beauty?" is published in le, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of
Difference, a book of short polemic essays, each focused on a particular
aspect of Irigaray's thinking in order to introduce it to a wider
audience and demonstrate its politics. This essay can work as an
indicative reading, pointing to areas in Irigaray's broader work that
are important for developing radical discourses and practices of art.
Irigaray begins by positing her argument in words which are a challenge
to many of us who are involved with contemporary art practices.
This terminology can even appear naive for a number of reasons.
Most of us making or working with art will have assimilated, for
instance, Adorno's discussion about the impossibility of lyricism
after Auschwitz, or the way an avant-garde-ist principle of epater
les bourgeois has disintegrated into postmodernist horror-chic, or
a feminist-realist impulse to tell it like, it is," or
possibly even the desire for catharsis which can only be achieved
at the resolution of a certain order of narrative. At first,
Irigaray appears either to ignore or be unaware of the impact
ofeach of these issues for contemporary art practice. She writes:
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Very often, when looking at women's works of art, I
have been saddened by the sense of anguish they express, an
anguish so strong it approaches horror. Having wanted to
contemplate beauty created by women, I would find myself faced
instead with distress, suffering, irritation, sometimes ugliness.
The experience of art, which I expected to offer a moment of
happiness and repose, of compensation for the fragmentary nature
of daily life, of unity and communication or communion, would
become yet another source of pain, a burden.Irigaray uses the rest of the essay to outline in
four main points why she thinks women make images ofpain and how
women could create beauty. First, she puts herself into the
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discussion by pointing out that she too deals with pain in her
work, but states that she attempts to do so in what she calls
"a literary style" to cushion any potential sense of
dereliction in the reader. At the same time she will look for
something positive something for which, she says, women, "who
have a tendency to identify only with what they lack, their
shortcomings," sometimes criticize her. She says that showing
the negative is positive and necessary given that it was meant to
stay hidden. The portrayal of suffering is, then, for women an act
of truthfulness. It's also akin to an individual and collective
catharsis. . . . Daring to manifest publicly individual and
collective pain has a therapeutic effect, bringing relief to the
body and enabling them to accede to another time. This doesn't
come as a matter of course, but it may be the case for some women.
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She likes the anguish represented to that of (
unspecified) masked figures in Greek tragedy who were subjected to
fate.Irigaray's second point is that having children is a most
wonderful creativity.
However, within the "male social order"
there is a particular obligation to do it; and further, a
distinction is made between creation, which is reserved for men,
and procreation, which is deemed of a lesser order. She suggests
that ~~there would seem to be confusion now between the beauty of
the work [of childbirth] and its definition within a between-men
civilization in which women no longer have a recognized right to
engender spiritual values."
The third point is stated bluntly: " As women,
we have thus been enclosed in an order of forms inappropriate to
us. In order to exist, we must break out of these forms.
"This may have one of three consequences. First, it may destroy us: "
Instead of being reborn, we annihilate ourselves." |
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Second, it
may show us what flesh, and therefore what colours, we have left:
"I think colour is what's left of life beyond forms, beyond
truth or beliefs, beyond accepted joys and sorrows.Colour also
expresses our sexuate nature, that irreducible dimension of our
incarnation." The third possible consequence of breaking out
of the inappropriate order of forms which encloses us is that
women may rediscover their identity and forms, forms which are
"always incomplete, in perpetual growth, because a woman
grows, blossoms and fertilizes (herself) within her own
body." |
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The fourth and final main point of "How Can We
Create Our Beauty?" concerns the representation of a
"female divine." The between-men culture disallows
women's expression of meaning. Just as a child is not an abstract
or arbitrary sign, so too for women "meaning remains
concrete, close, related to what is natural, to perceptible
forms."ll In what is called pre-history, women participated
in civil and religious life and were represented as
woman-goddesses (not only as mother-goddesses). Today, lack of
divine representation leaves women in a state of dereliction,
without means of designating or expressing self, or of identifying and respecting mother-daughter
genealogies.
From this essay, then, there are three salient points
for discussion: ( 1) the very broad issues of flesh, body, their
representation, and female |
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morphology; (2) the nature of female
creativity and subjectivity; and (3) the representation ofwhat
Irigaray terms the ~~female divine" and its inevitable
adjuncts, "universality" and 4~transcendence."
Running through these discussions, as they unfold into Irigaray's
wider writings, are two others: 4) the necessity for productive acknowledgment of female genealogies
(two-way interchanges between mother and daughter, and its
concomitant, exchanges between women) and; 5) in very close
relation to this, a notion of ful-fillment or
4"becoming" for women. Without any of these points, |
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women's beauty is not possible: indeed, in conjunction they would
be productive of and allow for the performativity of women's
beauty. It is thus clear that anything approaching "an
Irigarayan aesthetic" will not be found in the reproduction
of certain methodologies in the studio, or adherence to one or
another "style" of imagery. Irigaray's discussion of beauty
therefore, and my discussion here, is not about defining a new
aesthetic, nor is it an essentialist notion of a female aesthetic
which has been overshadowed by a male aesthetic, and which only
requires a light to be shone on it in order to become visible. For
Irigaray, "beauty" for women is a potential state of
being which can only come about as a result of rethinking
political and cultural discourse. Her discussion of beauty is
about making possible an order of discourse which would in and of
itself, and inevitably, be productive of beauty. It is |
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a
discussion which requires the reader to think differently: to
rethink what might be productive of beauty, and what might
constitute the transcendental and the universal.
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