Have male artists ever succeeded in capturing the prismatic essence of the feminine? This is one of myriad questions posed by feminist artist Judy Chicago and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith in their book Women and Art: Contested Territory, in which they look at significant images of women, by both male and female artists, from over 3,000 years.[1] But what exactly is this essence? Writer Lauren Elkin perhaps hints at the same thing when, speaking of the artist Jenny Saville, known for her monumental, abject nudes, she writes: ‘She didn’t want to be only the artist or the subject; she wanted to be both, to be her own subject, in order to create on the canvas “the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies”.’[2] The artist herself speaks to this in her uncomfortably fleshy painting Propped (1992), across the surface of which she has inscribed the following quote from the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray: ‘If we continue to speak in this sameness, speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other. Again […] Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear…’[3]

And yet woman has not disappeared.[4] She has been the object of art for centuries, while women, as producers of art, have remained marginalised.[5] As an image, or object, woman bears specific connotations and meanings: she is passive, available, possessable, powerless. Man, on the other hand, is absent from the image, but it is his speech, his view, his position of dominance, which the images signify. They are in his language; Irigaray’s ‘sameness’. The individual artist does not simply express himself but is ‘the privileged user of the language of his culture which pre-exists him as a series of historically reinforced codes, signs and meanings which he manipulates or even transforms but can never exist outside of’.[6] The female nude – bound up, as it is, in cultural history – presents woman as body or ‘sex’; nature as opposed to male culture.[7] For a woman artist, therefore, to do as Saville does, to act in both roles – object and subject – simultaneously, is to stage a crucial intervention.[8] It is down to her to ‘transform this objectification; to become the subject commenting on the meaning of the object, or to become the subject rejecting the object and revealing the real experience of being.’[9]

In The Second Sex, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir writes the following: ‘Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being. […] She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.’[10] This might strike us now as a dated notion, but this concept of alterity, of ‘otherness’, and woman’s internalisation thereof, remains inextricably bound up with the problematics of self-representation as outlined above.[11] There is a narrow line between a woman artist staging a ‘crucial intervention’ and a woman artist reinforcing traditional – and negative – images of woman. While Lucie-Smith, speaking as a man – ‘the privileged user of […] historically reinforced codes’ – proposes that ‘the only way the subject can find to resist the claims made on her is to vanish altogether,’[12] as Irigaray confirms will be the case should nothing change, let us instead, as indeed Irigaray also suggests, consider the problem linguistically.

The canon of western art history – as created, viewed and written about primarily by men – sits within what Irigaray, and her contemporary Hélène Cixous, term ‘the discourse of man’. To look at woman from within this discourse is, indeed, as de Beauvoir observed, to see her only as the Other – formed by man in his own image. Take, for example, God’s creation of Adam, and his subsequent – and derivative – creation of Eve, formed from Adam’s rib.[13] The image of woman as the Other, formed in man’s own image, indeed suggests, as Irigaray further notes, that: ‘For [men], being drawn to the other[14] means a move toward one’s mirage: a mirror that is (barely) alive.’[15] De Beauvoir also uses the mirror as a metaphor, writing: ‘It is above all in woman that the reflection allows itself to be assimilated to the self […][M]an who feels and wants himself to be activity and subjectivity does not recognise himself in his immobile image […] while the woman, knowing she is and making herself object, really believes she is seeing herself in the mirror: passive and given, the reflection is a thing like herself.’[16] Man need not see his reflection as himself, since, looking at woman, he sees his own mirage. He is always subject and never object. Must woman, therefore, who has always been object, reject her mirror image in order to claim her own subjectivity? Art historian Marsha Meskimmon, writing about the American feminist artist Joan Semmel and her painting Me Without Mirrors (1974), says: ‘To deny the mirror in a painted likeness of the self is to defy convention in respect of the genre of self-portraiture. This self-portrait, “without mirrors”, asserts a different model of seeing, likeness and representation through the simple device of challenging the mirror.’[17] And, in Speculum of the Other Woman,[18] Irigaray does precisely that, declaring the standard, flat, Lacanian mirror, which reflects only the order associated with masculine law, to marginalise woman by placing her outside the frame. In order to ‘see’ woman, Irigaray asserts, the mirror itself – i.e. the logic of our systems of thought (logos; our words) – must be altered. The alternative she proposes is the speculum – the convex mirror used in vaginal examinations – which will reflect ‘the other’/’woman’ in its/her own terms. To paraphrase, one might say that with a (Lacanian, flat) mirror, woman is bound to only ever see herself from without, as object, whereas without a mirror, or indeed with the curved speculum, she will see herself from within, as both subject and object.

To realise this metaphorical possibility, we must first reject the prevalent, phallologocentric[19] philosophical tradition of the West. Thus – and this is based on the definitions and distinctions drawn by Irigaray, who herself draws on those of Emmanuel Levinas[20] – we must reject the essentialist idea that there is but one kind of being, whereby woman is understood to be merely ‘relatively other’ (‘small-o other’) to man, with no being of her own and understood only in terms of her lack (of male attributes). Instead, we must conceive of woman as ‘absolutely Other’ (‘big-O Other’) to man, whereby she must be understood in terms specific to herself (from within) and is irreducible to man’s terms (or the discourse of man, from without). Irigaray further distinguishes between ‘sexual difference’, which she sees as ontic, referring to specific features of a particular individual’s way of being in the world, and ‘sexuate difference’, which is neither biological nor cultural, but ontological.[21] This latter is the difference between man and woman, when woman is understood to be absolutely Other.

Acknowledging the vital role of language, de Beauvoir notes: ‘If I want to define myself, I first have to say, “I am a woman”,’[22] and the Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, using the terminology of ‘sexual difference’, but, I think, referring more to Irigaray’s ‘sexuate difference’ (since she adds: ‘It is not solely biological; it is, above all, given in the representations that we ourselves make of this difference’), queries how it might thus be defined, concluding similarly: ‘We have no other means of constructing this representation than through language, through tools for symbolising.’[23] I take this – ‘language’ and ‘tools for symbolising’ – to include also the visual language of art. And, further, just as Irigaray seeks a space in which to ‘speak female’ (parler femme) (choosing to do so poetically in an imagined dialogue for female lovers rather than by making definitive statements about such a language or creating a metalanguage),[24] and Cixous calls for woman to ‘write her self’ and ‘put herself into the text – as into the world and into history,’[25] so, I believe, women artists must – and, indeed, do – ‘paint/draw/perform woman’. And ultimately, as Cixous continues: ‘Now women return from afar, from always: from “without”’ [my emphasis].[26] Her entreaty is as follows: ‘If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within”, to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of.’[27]

In terms of visual art, we might therefore say that male artists portray woman from without, but from within the phallocentric discourse of man. Self-portraiture, as artist-photographer Rosy Martin notes, ‘is a way of coming into representation for women, in which the artist is both subject and object and conceives of how she looks in the sense of how she sees rather than how she appears.’[28] She is object when she views herself in the same way as the male artist does, but she is subject when she portrays herself from within, but from without the – now exploded, turned around and seized – discourse of man, which, by parler femme (in whichever is her chosen medium), she has made her own.

© Anna McNay, January 2024

[1] Judy Chicago & Edward Lucie-Smith, Women and Art: Contested Territory, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.

[2] Lauren Elkin, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, London: Chatto & Windus, 2023, p49.

[3] Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together,’ 1977, translated by Carolyn Burke, in Signs, vol 6, no 1, Women: Sex and Sexuality, part 2, autumn 1980, pp69-79, p69.

[4] Following the literature, I use the term ‘woman’ to refer to the abstract concept of ‘womanness’, whereas ‘women’ refers to a group of specific individuals.

[5] Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection. Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century, University of Michigan: Scarlet Press, 1996, p14.

[6] Rozsika Parker & Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London: IB Tauris, 2013, p116.

[7] Parker & Pollock, p119.

[8] ‘Crucial intervention’ is the term used by Meskimmon, p14.

[9] Chicago & Lucie-Smith, p184, cite from Michelle Cliff, ‘From Object into Subject: Some Thoughts on the Work of Black Women Artists,’ in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldua, San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990, pp271-90. Cliff is talking specifically about the doubly-objectified Black woman artist, but this call to action could apply to women artists across the board.

[10] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, translated by Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, London: Vintage eBooks, 2011, p26.

[11] See also Whitney Chadwick (ed), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998.

[12] Chicago & Lucie-Smith, p138.

[13] nb. Reference to the disobedient Lilith - Adam’s first wife, created alongside him – is generally omitted from the Christian story of creation.

[14] Her use of a lower-case O is significant and will be elucidated shortly.

[15] Irigaray, p71.

[16] De Beauvoir, pp757-58.

[17] Meskimmon, p1.

[18] Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974, translated by Gillian Gill, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.

[19] The idea that the structure of language is androcentric and centred by the phallus gives rise to the term ‘phallocentric’. Jacques Derrida’s idea that the structure of language relies on spoken words being privileged over written ones produces ‘logocentric’. Cixous and Irigaray combine the two ideas to describe western cultural systems and structures as ‘phallogocentric’, i.e. based on the primacy of certain terms in an array of binary oppositions in which the first term is valued over the second term, e.g. male/female, speech/writing, good/evil, etc.

[20] See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 1961, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

[21] Rachel Jones, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy, Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011, p189.

[22] De Beauvoir, p25.

[23] Cited from a 1980 with Kristeva in Noëlle McAfee, Julia Kristeva, London: Routledge, 2004, p96.

[24] Carolyn Burke, ‘Introduction to Luce Irigaray’s “When Our Lips Speak Together”,’ in Signs, vol 6, no 1, Women: Sex and Sexuality, part 2, autumn 1980, pp66-68, p67.

[25] Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ 1975, translated by Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen, in Signs, vol 1, no 4, summer 1976, pp875-93, p875.

[26] Cixous, p877.

[27] Cixous, p887.

[28] Foreword by Rosy Martin to Meskimmon, pXV.