Victorian Visual Culture

During the Victorian era, women were often portrayed as delicate and primarily maternal rarely finding a need to leave the house. However, one woman blazed the trail by becoming the first salaried journalist in England and author of over 20 novels: Eliza Lynn Linton.

Before any feminists rejoice, it should be noted that many of her articles took an anti-feminist perspective. Her best-known piece was “The Girl of the Period” in which she attacks “The New Woman” as the educated and ambitious feminist. Linton pits “the girl of the period” against the traditional “fair young English girl.” The latter the definition of purity and dignity, the former the bane of a man’s existence. Linton explains that “the girl of the period does not please men,” and her article suggests that women started doing things for themselves such as dye their hair unnatural colors and wear makeup as a form of self-expression. Linton even said in her personal life, “I would rather have been the wife of a great man, or the mother of a hero, than what I am, famous in my own person.”

Eliza Lynn Linton condemns the modern woman for not conceding to her male counterpart and not taking on the docile visual representation allotted to her. Similarly, artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti created an idealized version of women throughout his works. Rossetti formulated a certain aestheticism in the women he painted: blonde, thin, white, and graceful. He viewed women as heavenly creatures who were visions of stateliness and chastity, much like Eliza Lynn Linton. As evident from his paintings, Rossetti’s women are all unnaturally beautiful and somehow chaste.

Though we claim to live in an ultra-feminist period, it is hard not to draw comparisons from the Victorian era to today. In fact, it is easy to pinpoint one woman who could be the pinnacle of “the girl of the period”: Kim Kardashian. Kim was relatively unknown before her sex tape was leaked without her permission. Her personal life was put out for the world to see and she was the one left to do damage control, not Ray J. However, she was able to turn a non-consensual event into a $53 million dollar fortune. It is easy to disapprove of her and her family’s televised life, but she has shown herself to be business-savvy (she made $85 million off her iPhone game.) Despite her intellectual capacity, we mostly see Kardashian on the covers of magazines such as Playboy and Rolling Stone. She has capitalized on her sexuality, shamelessly owning it. She transcends the backside expectations of chastity and is paving the way for a new type of girl: the one who can survive a humiliating burst into public and make herself more relevant than the guy who leaked it. Unlike Linton wanted, she is not famous for being the accessory of a great man. She is famous in her own person and how she defines that is her own choice.

A few weeks ago, our class had the privilege of visiting the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum for a private viewing. One piece in particular struck me: Pok Chi Lau’s photograph of a man in China post-revolution. At first glance it is not clear whether or not the photo is actually two photos combined as one is in black and white and the other in color. Though the man in the photo is emaciated, his stance seems defiant. Given context, we learned that the man had been around during the revolution, presumably when the red wall seen on the left was still intact. Behind him is a Chairman Mao, artfully placed to remind the viewer that even though the revolution is over it is inescapable. The man himself is a relic of the revolution and the past is more than just tangible: it surrounds him. He is old enough to know what China was like before the revolution. Interestingly enough, the Chinese believe red to mean good luck and that it wards off evil. However, painted in white is the Chinese symbol for “communism” on the red wall.

I loved our Night at The Museum. What fascinated me were some of the parallels we can see between images of suffering in the world today and images of suffering from the 19^th Century. Famine exists in the world today. Hungry people, emaciated children, and starving communities are the results of misallocation of food resources and exploitation of labor, amongst many other things. This is a reality; just not our reality.

As human beings, we tend to insert our own narratives onto images in order to relate to the subject. And we relate to images because of familiar details. However, what happens when we are confronted with an unfamiliar image? What happens when we come face to face with an image of suffering that is unsettling; it may be familiar, but the image is too far removed from our reality.

The truth of the matter is we tend not to address images that make us uncomfortable.  Take this image of “UR-Mutter” by Adrian Piper. It belongs to a series containing eleven photographs with different titles but of the exact same image- a blown-up photograph by photojournalist Peter Turnley. Piper is drawn to photojournalist Turnley’s images because it is a secular “Madonna image stripped of any spiritual connotations.”

• Ur-Mutter #2
• 1989
• Photo-montage; created with silk-screened text.

This image alone is confrontational, verging on accusatory, making it uncomfortable to look at- but only to a degree. If I were to see it in a newspaper, I would want to look at it, but I would also want to look away. I would probably pay more attention to the story and text accompanying it. But what happens when photojournalism is adopted by an artist and becomes a word of art?

UR-Mutter uses the formula of red text superimposed on the photograph with different phrases. At first, I felt that the artist has appropriated a photojournalist’s work, and the labels are confining the image to a particular message. Before examining the relationship between words and text more closely, I believed Piper to be reducing the mother and child to just their suffering. In fact, the mother’s expression felt not only sad but full of anger and pain. I felt Piper was accusing the viewer by creating art to be displayed in galleries and museums. But was/is that really the case? Was Piper making the subjects ‘objects’ of observation or conversation?

Now I feel this image evokes sympathy and empathy from the viewer, AND subtly blames the audience, or rather, makes the feel accountable (to an extent) for the situation photographed.“Urmutter” means Earth Mother in German, but some students from class interpreted the title UR-Mutter, as “Your Mother” in English, as if one is muttering the term.

After reading Piper’s interviews, she is clearly emphasizing the African blood that runs in all of us. She wants the rest of the world to be aware of how we are contributing to the suffering of others in third world countries, especially those in Africa. (Notice “We made you” is written over the mother’s hands). Nevertheless, there is more complexity to the image than the titles suggest.

Some of these titles include, “We made you” (UR-Mutter #2 in the MHCAM’s work), “fight or die” (ex. “UR-Mutter #3”) and “Relax. We don’t want what you have” (ex. “UR-Mutter #4”).  Granted, the titles such as “We Made You,” emphasize the subject’s role as a mother, but the word “we” allow her to become the symbol of all struggling mothers, who must “fight or die” in order to feed their starving children. This mother represents collective suffering. But this woman is so much more than a mother. There is more to her than the icon of Somalian female suffering she has become.

After talking to Professor Martin, I could see how she sees the text as more than just labels, they actually open up space for discussion. What is the result of such an artistic endeavor? The combination of image and text does indeed “create a nuanced and confrontational effect in order to elicit a viewer’s response” (Piper). Relying less on the shock value of the image presented allows the viewer to really think about the complexity captured in one snapshot.

In The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper, Piper explains that her technique of combining text and image exhausts “the range of available conceptual interpretations.” This allows the subject to be free of some bias by “peeling off one pseudo-rational categorization after another, so as to finally leave one with the bare experience of the subject itself, which is a universal icon” (95).

Normally a person is desensitized after looking at the same image repeatedly. However, by using the same image with a different title, Piper is forcing the viewer to look at the picture in a new light and reconsider the purpose of such an exhibit. It is hard to ignore the suffering. Though she becomes the face for Somalian mothers struggling, she also able to retain her identity (to an extent). It bothers me that the woman remains nameless, anonymous, but Piper is emphasizing the strong presence of the mother in all eleven images. When viewed within the context of the entire series, beyond individualistic suffering, her individuality is highlighted. Thus, the viewer is made to see the futility of categorization.

The woman fills up the space, and takes over the composition, pushing the boundaries while being framed or rather limited, by the size of the paper and the medium of photography itself. This is just one perspective, one side of her story- with this particular child (he/she is less visible but present, nonetheless). He/she is seen in relation to her, and despite the emphasis on the mother, I believe it is impossible to reduce her- and even her child, to the confinements of words.

The various words provoke us to do the same; to reject labels and accept this woman and child are real human beings, they have various roles in society as survivors, as fighters; they are more than images and words will ever be able to encapsulate.

Bibliography:

1) Piper, Adrian. Out of Order, out of Sight. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996. Print.

2) Piper, Adrian. “Cornered: a Video Installation Project” Transcript from Theory in Contemporary Art from 1985 (2005), pg. 186

3) Piper, Adrian, Maurice Berger, and Jean Fisher. “The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper.” Adrian Piper: A Retrospective. Baltimore, MD: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1999. Print.

Following up on Mary’s wonderful post, I wanted to share two more of Cameron’s photographs restaging King Lear. They are very complex photographs in their interpretation and engagement with the play, but I’m also interested in the way that, by representing one moment from a play, they anticipate the logic of the film still.

Thanks to Kay Heffernan for leading me to these photographs.

Though keeping cats as pets began in the earliest of times, it became increasingly popular in the 19th century. Animals in general became status symbols and symbols of the ability to control the uncontrollable.

In particular, cats and women became closely related. No matter what the sex, cats and women were compared because of the understanding that both were domestic and indoor creatures. In general, men compared women to cats in a largely negative manner: “An animal so keen on maintaining her appearance, so silky, so tiny, so eager for caresses, so ardent and responsive, so graceful and supple….; an animal that makes the night her day, and who shocks decent people with the noise of her orgies, can have only one single analogy in this world, and that analogy is of the feminine kind” (Toussenel, Zoologies Passionelle). The two were often thought to have dispositions of prostitutes, signaling a hard and fast belief that women were either chaste or promiscuous, domesticated or wild.

Because of their perceived devious femininity and sexuality, women were often compared to cats and vice versa. Both were said to be eager to escape domesticity and likely to be seduced by immoral nature.

Like Victorian women, cats were described to be “the embodiment of elegance, grace and agility… Very little, in fact, is needed to make the Cat stray from the paths of domesticity and return again to the happier hunting-grounds of its remote ancestors.”

Besides stereotyping women, cats became a new mascot of advertising. Most fittingly cats were seen in a large amount of soap advertisements and became synonymous with cleanliness.