Naked Authority: The Body in Western Art 1830-1908 by Marcia Pointon Review by: Gillian Elinor Feminist Review,

No. 43, Issues for Feminism (Spring, 1993), pp. 97-100 Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1395076 . Accessed: 01/04/2014 03:25
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Reviews 97 ventionsto recognize that the enterprise involves internal contradictions. In the case of this book, evenif it werepossible to addin more and more factors or categoriesto reflectwomen's experiences, this attentionto diversity wouldeventually collapse intoa muddled homogeneity which flattens out, and treats as equal,women's different, and differently privileged, positions. Moreover,notionsof accuracy, truth and realityunderlying this position leave unquestioned the knowledgeproducing practices ofempirical psychology. Erica Burman

mothering will necessarily be politically progressive, given the current functions and organization of psychology - in the editorial introduction Ann Phoenix and Anne Woollett describe well the polarized and equally unsatisfactory treatment of black women in psychologicalliterature as either devalued absence or pathologizedpresence. It could be argued that formulating critiques which assume that a discipline like psychologycan be 'improved' is reformist. But this would be to ignore the strategic impact this persuasive book will have for its audience within psychology. It is however important for all of us struggling to make similar inter-

Naked Authority: The Body in Western Art 183>1908

Marcia Pointon
CambrzdgeUniversityPress 1990 ISBN O521 50999 3 14.95 Pbk ISBN O521 38528 8 35 Hbk

In 1989 MarciaPointon asked which direction 'a theorised art history might take in the l990s?' (Pointon, 1989). The direction she offers in this book of essays is a careful and multilayered analysis of paintings as material objectsin their own terms. It is an analysis she regards as the public responsibility of art historians, one which she believes they have recently failed. Despite her general welcome, it is history labelled 'new' she claims most culpable. That history, whose purpose lies in deconstruction of the artefact, is most vulnerable to the charge of dealing best with the worst paintings1- or of not dealing with them at all, but with merely their surrounding discourses. New art histoxy has not accounted for the needs and desires of artists and viewers who make and respond to certain artefacts regarded as 'best'.Pointon herself does not labour issues of qualitative judgement but does proclaim that

many canonicalworks have 'an abiding power to move people' (p. 3) and despite being institutional 'high' art forms, their effect is personal. So she deals here with 'important'paintings that are also 'vety popular'. In her first essay on the female nude Pointon disposes of the popular binary opposites posited by Kenneth Clark and John Berger. Clark's notion of the natural body outside culture and against which art is to be measured, along with Berger's proposition that the nude be true woman 'translated into art by love' (p. 17) are dismissed as 'deeply flawed' (p. 33). But also she urges acknowledgement that depiction of the female nude does not always represent male power over women. Instead Pointon argues that such rigid categories of viewing position cannot be so established because representation of the body will constantly shift. Her agenda throughout these essays is to examine the unstable boundaries of such movements in order to gain an understanding of whether, and how, such images articulate power, and over whom. The chapter on psychoanalysis maps more fully the terrain of succeeding essays, as Pointon addresses

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Review 98 Feminist
and readers, across time. For example, one study looks at the issue of desire in relation to the invisibility of women's fertility in nineteenthcentury society. Pointon suggests that attempts to encompass this unseen within the seen in paintings of fertility and maternity, were prompted by male fear of castration which, according to this semiotic, psychoanalytic approach, express the painter's fear of fusion with the lost mother, that pleasure which was sacrificed for power. In another example Pointon uses Julia Kristeva's insight which insists on the simultaneous reassurance and instability of motherhood, with its promise of transcendence. Here she offers Renoir's late nudes, in particular The of Paris, as works which Judgement express that artist's abjectness, his condition of absolute fear, and his desire for reversion to Kristeva'spreOedpial master-mother relationship. As Pointon'sRenoirapproaches death, Kristeva's'sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms' would providea convincingknell (Kristeva, 1982: 210). Yet again, in a study of Michael Fried's analysis of Thomas Eakin's The GrossClinic, this historian is taken to task for dabblingin psychoanalysis merely to confirm and reiterate the transference situation. In his patriarchal narrative male power is again represented against female lack, and in order to proclaim the value of the male role within art history. Marcia Pointon contains the issues she raises within her casestudies, and there is no concluding chapter. As a result this book of essays provides openings with which we may engage. Two essays I found particularly stimulating were those on Delacroix's Libertyon the Barrisur cades and Manet's Le Dejeuner l'herbe. Pointon's analysis of Delacroix'spainting shows how the construction of sexuality here, which at once heroicizes and demonizes is both woman, is ambiguous.Liberty

the 'unacknowledgedinvestment' of art history in psychoanalysis. In asserting similarities between these disciplines (most delightfully, an obsessive concern in looking for lost objects) and by making the case for transference relations in academic scholarship, Pointon properly acknowledges her masters. She peals the ring of Great Fathers - Kenneth Clark is 'brilliant' and E. H. Gombrich 'justly celebrated', then Max Friedlander and Ernst Kris in Chapter Two are followed hard by Warburg, Wolfflin, Riegl, Pevsner and Panofsky. Hugh Honour and John Fleming are merely 'useful', though art historians manques are properly trounced - and we find John Berger reducedto a signature, a mere sign to represent the ideas of others. Here are the big knocks aimed most frequently at sons and siblings, spectacularly at Michael Fried, descendant of the Father-ghost of Greenberg (dismissed by absence fromthis dramatis personae).VVhilst berating Michael Baxendall for being 'short-sighted over questions of gender' (p. 3) she also swipes at Carol Duncan with her own phrase 'male sexual appetite' as being without specificity.2But a woman- and beside that roll-call the names of the women have appeared - Anita Brookner, for example, represents traditional values, Linda Nochlin plays comradeat arms. Thus was the field delineated forthe demonstrably authoritative Pointon to disrupt the smooth transitions of lineal descent. Marcia Pointon deals with issues of gender, and as a feminist she has an interest in unravelling texts as a seeing woman. The result is work of satisfying scholarship and fascinating insights. Pointon asserts that both art and art history are places where 'displaced' repetition of the Oedipal scene can be enacted, as her succeeding case-studies demonstrate. She addresses what she names as 'intersubjectivity' (p. 1) by which she means the subjectivities of artists

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Reviews

99

the allegorical good (freedom) and bad (licence) woman, a duality which may be explained in Melanie Klein's object relations theory (Mitchell, 1986).3 ein suggested that the infant's splitting of the object results in severance of love and hate, so it seems that Delacroix's approach to Libertysways between those two emotions, and also between sexuality and politics, allegory and realism. Pointon names Le Dejeuner sur l'hverbe as Manet's successor to Liberty,in examining the relationship between the real and ideal in French nineteenth-century painting; again, allegory threatens to collapse into the real. However the lack of narrative closure in Le Dejeuner turns attention to the act of reading. Pointon's analyses of these two paintings can be taken I believe, to represent case-studies of radical negativity. Feminine negativity is a principle proposedby Julia Kristeva as a means of escape from the impasse imposed on us by Jacques Lacan's fixed gender hierarchy. He asserted that woman is only the excluded Other of male discourse (the symbolic) and that indeed, 'there is no such thing as woman' (quoted in Irigaray, 1985: 87). For Kristeva, the very exclusion of woman from the symbolic realm privileges her to express the repressed truth which cannot be spoken of in social life. It is this which has potential to disrupt fixed linguistic and social codes in the form of feminine negativity. From Pointon we gain insight into Liberty as a representation of that principle, here fragmenting the conventions of audience response. This is marked by the frequent re-use of her image, severed from the violence and the real (male) world which is actually her context. And Manet's female nude also possesses qualities of radical negativity. It is she who holds the balance of power for the viewer, she who has subversively challenged male authority, as the word and the

body interlock across that picnic area. Pointon shows how the story that cannot be told in Le Dejeuner (what after all, is he saying?) has been treated either to participative acts from viewers, or to symbolic inversion of the gender hierarchy. Kristeva claimed that radical negativity possesses subversive political potential. To my mind, Pointon's work illuminates that articulation in the shape of Liberty. Nevertheless, on reading her two essays I was drawn to return to Pointon's Introduction,to her stated aim of accounting for the 'intersubjectivities' of artists and viewers. These she has discussed in varieties of ways throughout, and although the issue of gender constantly erupts, its intersubjectivity does not. I believe however, that she did propose it for Le Dejeuner. Pointon does not connect with the use of this same term- intersubjectivity- by Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell (1987). Their work builds on Kristeva's softening of the gender categories which has conceptually undermined the Lacanian Oedipal structure. Kristeva showed the interdependence of masculinity and femininity, in that identity, known only through the relational Other, makes interdependence internal as well as external. In other words, both femininity and masculinity possess the Other of their own self-difference, each thus having an internal dialectic which is beyond the gender system. It is this dimension which Cornell and Thurschwell identify as one which may generate intersubjectivity, that is, the potential of communicative freedom. Their thesis however, involves a rejection of the feminine exclusivity of Kristeva's radical negativity. This, they demonstrate, leads to an essentialist position which is one Kristeva herself would wish to avoid. Pointon noted that Delacroix finally sought control of the female power he had raised, 'striding towards the viewer over the bodies of

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100 FeministReuiew

dead men' (p. 73) by means of carefully placing his signature (the word of his male power)onthe painting. In Le Dejeuner however, there is no such attempted resolution, the word and the body are indeed shown by Pointon to be interdependent. Articulation of the word is promised (the male hand so gestures) but is not spoken. The naked body preventing his articulation is unstable, her clothes lying nearby remind us of her de-socialized position, together with all that she hides from him. But neither male nor female (not word nor body) has the power. In refusing to identify the power-holder,Manet gives the space to self-difference. It would seem that the intersubjectivity of artist and viewers of Le Dejeuner can occuronly in that dimension beyond the gender system. Gillian Elinor

Notes

1 The case cited by Pointonis a review by Anita Brookner in The Observer 15 May 1988. 2 Here Pointon cites C. Duncan's article as 1982, in its reprint form and date- it was first published in Artforumin 1973, and at that time represented one of the earliest, and extremely helpful feminist art historical analyses. 3 See especially chapter, 'Notes on some schizoid mechanisms'(1940)
References
CORNELL,D.

and THURSCHWELL,A. (1987) 'Feminism, negativity, intersubjectivity' in S. Benhalib and D. Cornell editors, Feminism as Critique: Essays Press.

on thePoliticsof Gender in LateCapitalist Societies Cambridge: Polity

IRIGARAY,Luce

Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection New York: Columbia University Press. MITCHELL,Juliet (1986) editor, TheSelected Melanie Klein Harmondsworth: Penguin. POINTON, Marcia (1989) SVimagery'Art History March.
KRISTEVA,Julia

(1985) This Sex Which is NotOne,trans. C. Porter and C. Burke

Vested Interests: Crossdressing and Cultural Anxiety

Marjorie B. Garber
Routledge:New Yorkand London 1992, ISBN 0 415 90072 7, 25.00 Hbk

'One thing that sticks out about the codpiece. . .'(p. 122) is a painful pun, but forgivable were it the exception rather than the rule. However, multiplied across the 400 pages of

Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and CulturalAnxiety,it is calculated to

set on edge the teeth of even the most tolerant reader, particularly given Manorie Garber's grating literary combination of twee wordplay and ingenuous insertion of the authorial voice. Glib chapter and subheadings - 'Clothes encounters of the third kind'- are matched by a multiplicity of abstruse and unexplained introductory quotations; while paragraphs which open with, 'It is not clear to me who reads these novels

and magazines, but some statistics suggest that male transvestites are largely middle-class, heterosexual and married', (p. 96) only serve to further undermine the author's authority. This immature prose style is coupledwith a tendency not to define her terms, and to casually toss in complex and undersubstantiated conclusions while spending pages chattily discussing irrelevant material. For example, Garberuses the historically and culturally specific 'genderbending'(p. 62) in relation to Harvard's 'Hasty pudding theatricals' of the mid-nineteenth century. Although she is Professor of 13nglish at Harvard University, Garber also apparently finds the conceptof 'great theater' unproblematic, given her statement that: 'The notion that there has to be a naturalness to the sign is exactly what great theater puts in question.' Similar linguistic imprecision is

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