Espíritu- Persona- Comunidad

Introduction

The Virtual Feminist Museum of Women’s Figurative Art and Melancholy creates a space in which we can experience and reflect upon how women figurative artists question and confront, sometimes in a dramatic and far-reaching manner, at other moments, in tiny and nuanced ways, the prevailing modes of thinking about and making work about melancholy.

Within the cultural canon, as I have noted in Chapter Two, the female figure has been used to bolster representations of men’s melancholic experience, or to represent women’s experience according to the roles prescribed to them within patriarchy. So that whilst the contribution of male artists to this art history is recognised, taken as the general position and indicative of dominant thought on the topic, the contribution of women artists to this history has been forgotten and is yet to be fully

acknowledged.

That does not mean that the artworks produced by women figurative artists should be presented as a coherent alternative history to the prevailing canon. Instead they are viewed as providing an insight into the changing experiences and ways of

representing melancholy amongst women. My reading of the artworks in my vfm describes how all the women artists included not only faced the problem of working with the symbols of melancholy laid down by prominent male artists of the time, but sought to assert their own voice too.

This sometimes tense relationship between the dominant canon and feminism is described well by cultural theorist Claire Colebrook:

‘Feminism has never been the pure and innocent other of a guilty and evil patriarchy. It has always been obliged to use the master’s tools to destroy his house and has done so in the full knowledge that this complicity with its corruption and contamination is itself an action against metaphysics’

(Colebrook, 2000: 3).

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Following Colebrook, I do not suggest therefore that women’s figurative art and melancholy sits purely and hermetically outside the dominant canon. I argue that feminism needs to both acknowledge the traditional canon of melancholy, and to speak of women artists’ own history and engagement with the issue. My aim

therefore, is not to set up a simple opposition between male and female melancholy, but instead to show how the discourse between women figurative artists opens up new ways of thinking about melancholy. Hence ‘it is the strategy of locating oneself within a body of thought in order to disorganise that body’ that characterises my vfm (Ibid. 4–5). It is about finding ways to include representations that have been

excluded from the dominant canon and to use those works to raise new feminist questions about and suggest potentialities of the representation of women’s experience of melancholy.

The initial inspiration for the themes of the vfm I have created is Robert Burton’s historic text, Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), after Hippocrates (c.460 BC – c.370 BC) and Avicenna¹, (c.980–1037) in which melancholy is divided into three principal categories:

‘The first proceeds from the sole fault of the brain and is called head-melancholy; the second sympathetically proceeds from the whole body, and when the whole temperature is melancholy: the third arises from the bowels, liver, spleen or membrane called mesenterium, named

hypocondrical or windy melancholy’ (Burton, 1621: 175).

These categories are Burton’s principal focus. However, there is a further additional but separate discussion of ‘love melancholy’ and ‘religious melancholy’ as forms of head melancholy in the third section (partition) of Burton’s book. So Burton’s categories attribute melancholy to aspects of the mind as well as the body. In practice, however, it is often difficult, as Burton acknowledges, to distinguish different types of melancholy from one another. This is because melancholy has historically intermixed with other conditions, such as madness, and there are ‘so many opinions about the kinds (of melancholy) as there be men themselves’ (Ibid.).

As Burton commented on his own earlier attempt at subdivision:

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‘Tis hard, I confess, yet nevertheless I will adventure through the midst of these perplexities and led by a clue or thread of the best writers, extricate myself out of the labyrinth of doubts and errors, and so proceed to the causes’ (Ibid. 177).

Burton goes further than simply categorising melancholy, elaborating its causes, symptoms and cures so that ‘every man that is in any measure affected will know how to examine himself and apply remedies to it’ (Ibid.).

The themes I address reflect the judgements I have made about the issues most relevant to women in the context of my vfm, and reflect the research and studio work that I do (see Figure 49). I name the first category in my vfm ‘melancholic

subjectivity’. The term melancholic subjectivity reflects the postmodern view of the subject as ‘a recipient site of meaning rather than the source’ (Gamble, 2001: 324). I also deploy aspects of Burton’s thematic, namely the inclusion of love melancholy and religious melancholy considered crucial to the women figurative artists in my vfm. Later, Kristeva’s writing in her text Tales of Love (1987) addresses the effect of motherhood on the emotional life of women, identifying it as a powerful source of melancholy. Here, therefore, I include mothers as a final category because it provides an opportunity to consider an aspect of women’s experience that is not suggested by Burton’s thematic, but which is significant for women.

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Figure 49. The Virtual Feminist Museum of Women’s Figurative Art and Melancholy (2013) Christina Reading

Diagram

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