OTRAS FUENTES DE ENERGÍA

One thing I am very certain of is that the work of Gilbert & George, and my

spectatorship of it, mark me out as female. The gendering of spectatorship is not in itself a cause of embarrassment, but feeling female establishes a predisposition towards an emotional response and towards exposure of the self as flawed. Being female is to be sexed rather than neutral, and to be a body rather than an intellect, and so the potential for a dis-passionate response is already foreclosed. The cause of the excessive femaleness of my spectatorship is the remarkable gender bias of their work. The landscape of Gilbert & Georgeworld is exclusively a spunkland, a boys-own, boys-only terrain. It is peopled by boys and men, rent boys, cocky boys, old men, religious men, black men, men in suits, pretty boys and derelict men. Women are completely absent, but not, I would argue, due to misogynism; simply that we, women, don’t figure. Gilbert and George have stated that everyone else paints women; they don’t. Representation of the female body within, and as art is so

99 ubiquitous that a deliberate omission should perhaps have attracted more attention, but like their sexual preferences, it goes largely unmentioned. The female absence within the frame draws attention to the genderedness of looking, a genderedness experienced as a surplus, outside, looking in. As I will discuss, the spectatorial position is a potential inversion of Mulveyan, normative gender roles, which posits woman as spectacle and man as bearer of the look. So whilst the exclusively male content of the work makes me aware of my gender, so too does the very act of looking.

Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ is the benchmark for a gendered and psychoanalytic reading of the spectator-text relationship. Though flawed, contested, and revised it remains an important work. Mulvey’s basic

premise is that mainstream western narrative cinema; metonymically standing for all visual experience is produced to gratify the appetites of the normative heterosexual male. Everything is organized from this specific viewing position, for his viewing pleasure. The man looks and the woman is looked at, or as Mulvey famously and splendidly puts it, ‘woman connotes to-be-looked-at-ness’.43

The woman is the object of multiple looks; she is looked at by the other (male) actors, by the camera, and finally by the cinema audience. Hers is a passive role of display, whilst the man enjoys the mobility and power of the look as a tool for control, and for fulfillment of desire; a look that within film theory is ‘the gaze’. The (heterosexual) male is offered two types of visual pleasure; scopophilia, objectification of the image, subjected to a controlling and curious gaze, and narcissism, a fascination with likeness and

recognition, rather than possessing the image, here the one who looks fantasizes that he is the image.

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100 Mulvey’s much criticised gender binary originally presupposed a straightforward heteronormativity – and given that she was analysing mainstream western narrative cinema, this was not unreasonable. Duncan makes the same assumptions for the gallery/museum;

Nevertheless, not only is the museum’s immediate space gendered, but so also is the larger universe implicit in its program. Both are a man’s world. This job of gendering falls largely to the museum’s many images of female bodies. Silently and surreptitiously they specify the museum’s rituals as a male spiritual quest, just as they mark the project of modern art in general as a male endeavour, built on male fears, fantasies and aspirations.44

In Gilbert & Georgeworld, woman is completely absent (yet still it reads as a man’s world) and so, if the object of the look is never female, could spectatorship of their work call for a reversal of ‘normal’ subject/object positions? Looking at a male object of display, is the spectator invited or obliged to adopt a female viewing position? Is the spectator, perhaps momentarily, objectified?

Spectatorship may be feminised but this does not of course necessarily frame it as female. Spectatorship of this male territory is not a simplistic inversion of the Mulveyan gender binary but is characterised as restricted, passive, emotional, and excessive. The images that confront the spectator are imagined for a male viewer, who is denied the normative viewing pleasures (looking at women) and forced to come face to face with an intense vision of (his own) masculinity. And yet, as the construction and stability of masculinity depends on its ‘other’, the absent feminine is more troubling in its absence than its controlled, i.e. looked at, presence could be. In Mulvey’s Freudian interpretation, woman is the object of pleasure but also causes anxiety; ‘in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her

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101 lack of penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure.’45 _{The absent} female is here cast as a threat to a queer equilibrium.

Gilbert & George Spunkland (1997) Photopiece 190 x 302 cm

The intrusion of femaleness into their boys-own world is evident as the imagined unpleasure of castration anxiety. This is closest to the surface in Spunkland, a vast image of magnified ejaculate creating a landscape that has a quality of fossilised minerals, lava flows, or petrified forests. A planetary object above adds to the sense of a barren landscape, and to the disconcerting instability of scale as if Gilbert and George have found themselves shipwrecked in Brobdingnag. In this fragile phallic world Gilbert and George wander hand in hand like lost boys. Because they are turned away from the viewer, their bare bodies, pink, like newborn mice, have no (visible) penises. The spectacle of the smallness of the figures with their evident lack juxtaposed with the excessive maleness of ten feet of spunk is an embarrassing

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102 display of castration anxiety. The self-contained and reductive maleness brings about the realisation that the image of woman has nothing at all to do with male desire; my role is to be anxiety.

As a female spectator, I am aware that my spectatorship of Gilbert & George intrudes on an exclusively male scene, by men and for a male gaze, a scene of pleasures I could or should take no part in. This makes me feel voyeuristic, like a tourist in their world. I am especially aware of indulging in gender, or perhaps even sexuality tourism, while standing for a long time, too long, reading the New Horny

Pictures, each a matrix of ads for rent boys.46 I read them with pleasure and some fascination knowing I am not the target audience of the ads and aware that this leaves me in a curious relation to the (content of the) art work. I read:

LET ME BE YOUR FANTASY . . . Older gentlemen welcome . . . 100% discreet . . . In/Out . . . rough & ready dead handsome VWE . . . Keep my phone number, you may need it.

Gilbert & George Named (2001) detail

46

New Horny Pictures; 2001 16 works: Ten, New, I Am . . . , Black, Nine, Geography,

Thirteen, West End, Twelve, Eight, Phone, Two, Tom, Ages, Four, Named. The works are

103 The ads are interspersed with images of G&G, impassive, suited, staring straight ahead. Formally these works are not engaging; the content however claims my prurient interest. Gilbert and George have described them as a memorial, and there is indeed a rather maudlin similarity with reading the inscriptions on gravestones. The spectator is eavesdropping on other lives, other deaths but there is a degree of sentimentality about the spectatorial position with its spurious distance and vicarious pleasures. In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick notes that ‘the position of sentimental spectatorship seemed to offer coverture for differences’ and she lists wealth/poverty and sexual entitlement as sentimentalised differences, both of which are poignantly, sentimentally applicable to these works.47 And in a wider sense, the way that The New Horny Pictures spectacularise homosexuality, reducing it to just cheap sex, could be read as an acute observation on what Sedgwick calls ‘a sentimental appropriation by the larger culture of male homosexuality as spectacle.’48

Or the spectator might take them at face value; they are very much about looking, and most specifically the intensity and duration of the look that we invest in them. This may range from a cursory glance, or browsing, through to a systematic and thoroughly engaged survey of the services available for hard cash. And that is where they become embarrassing, when the look lengthens into window shopping. They invite both too much interest and paradoxically too little; we risk taking them too literally. Each ad is complete with a phone number. I don’t know if they are real, or just another tease. I never had the balls to ring.

As a tourist in spunkland, snooping around the blatant homoeroticism and its evil twin; homophobia, my spectatorial position is comparable to that of Fanny Hill

47

Sedgwick, Epistemology, p151.

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104 peeping through a hole in the wall at ‘two young sparks’ in an adjoining room at an inn, engaged in preposterous pleasures, a spectatorial event that she recounts in her ‘memoirs’; A Woman of Pleasure. Fanny is in many ways a reliable witness, and gives a good account, despite her extravagant use of euphemism with its obvious links to embarrassment.49 She does not shrink from her duty to see everything she can, and to say everything she can see. Looking through her spyhole, she reports the following:

Slipping then aside the young lad’s shirt, and tucking it up under his clothes behind, he showed to the open air those globular, fleshy eminences that compose the mount-pleasants of Rome, and which now, with all the narrow vale that intersects them, stood displayed and exposed to his attack: nor could I, without a shudder, behold the dispositions he made for it. First then, moistening well with spittle his instrument, obviously to render it glib, he pointed, he introduced it, as I could plainly discern, not only from its direction and my losing sight of it . . . 50

At one point Fanny considers that one of the boys may be a girl in disguise, but then discounts this as a mistake on her part. The homoerotic scene, described with the same candour that she brings to bear on all her other descriptions, is one of

misrecognition, mistake and mispleasure (is this also a particularly feminised

viewpoint?).

Like Fanny, my spectatorial position is precarious. The vicarious pleasure I take is one of both recognition and misrecognition, and the embarrassment that Gilbert & George cause me is one of exposure. I am caught looking at something that quite explicitly excludes me, but as I look, I am drawn in. My awareness of exclusion is uncomfortably close to a desire for inclusion. That I am left out makes me feel

49 _{The vocabulary that Cleland gives Fanny is a satirical swipe at other writers of ‘whore}

biographies’ particularly Defoe and Richardson. The language now lends the episodes an element of humour, which partially negates the pornographic content. John Cleland, Fanny

Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (London: Penguin Books, 1985 (first published

1748)).

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105 exactly that; left out. I am excluded twice, once by femaleness and then again by straightness. I am embarrassed by my petulant desire to be counted in. Calvin Thomas offers a frank account of his straight relationship to ‘queer’, admitting the awkwardness of ‘the decidedly ambiguous labor of straight queer aspiration.’51 Looking, perhaps unreasonably, for a direct address to him in Butler’s Bodies That

Matter, Thomas acknowledges his hope to be ‘liked’. Firstly he wants to be liked,

that is to be valued, and secondly to be ‘made visible, counted in, to be liked in the mimetic sense of having one’s own likeness reproduced.’52

If I am embarrassed by not being ‘liked’ in spunkland, here I differ from Fanny. She is not embarrassed; she feels outraged. Her response is typically of her life and times, she burns ‘with rage and indignation’ at the unspeakable vice.53 _{Fanny is} exposed by her outrage at a scene of mutual pleasure, which she goes to extremes to see; she pierces the paper wall between herself and the scene with a bodkin to make a peephole, and stands on a chair to get a better view, and has the patience to see it through to the end. Is it possible that Fanny’s outrage is somewhat disingenuous, less at the ‘odious’ scene than at her exclusion from it? Within the scene she witnesses there is no space for her, no likeness of her, no potential for identification; her would-be place has been usurped by a ‘sweet pretty stripling’ who was ‘like his mother behind’.54 _{And Fanny is left without.}

51

Calvin Thomas, ed. Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of

Heterosexuality (Urbana Il: university of Illinois Press, 2000). p12.

52

Ibid. p21. See also Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (London: Routledge, 1993).

53 _{Homosexuals were then reviled alongside heretics and foreigners as ‘not like us’. See}

Peter Wagner’s notes to the Penguin Classics edition: Eighteenth-century attitudes to homosexuals or ‘Mollies’ were generally condemnatory. They were typically portrayed as effeminate, misogynistic perverts. Cleland, p231. See also Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982) and Katz, Jonathan Ned ‘The Age of Sodomitical Sin 1607-1740’ in Jonathan Goldberg, ed. Reclaiming Sodom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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106 Fanny is exposed by her outrage, and I am exposed by my exclusion/desire for inclusion; I am fascinated, touched, appalled, compromised, and without. ‘Without’ here is working for me like Edelman’s ‘behind’, and Thomas’s ‘liked’, doubling its meaning to indicate both my spectatorial position as a mere onlooker, outside the frame of action, and also the embarrassing sense of lack that the image causes me to feel. This is what Barthes would term an amphibology; a ‘sticky’ homonym that infers a relation between two meanings. Not so embarrassing as a Freudian slip, and subtler perhaps than a pun, more like a double entendre. An amphibology insists on meaning both its meanings at once, ‘as if one were winking at the other and as if the word’s meaning were in that wink.’55 _{The meaning, like the}

embarrassment is in language, but also embedded in discourse.

Fanny’s spectatorial position has been interpreted as inversely gendered. Nancy Miller recommended that ‘Fanny must be viewed as ‘a male “I” in female drag’’,56 and Edelman also reads Fanny’s position as one of reversal, associating her privileged seeing subject position with masculinity; ‘Fanny’s very spectatorial

position, for example, confers upon her the power to see without becoming an object of scrutiny herself – a power culturally coded as the prerogative of the heterosexual male’57

Edelman, continuing his conceit of the analytic scene as a sodomitical (be)hindsight also comments that like an analyst, she was able to ‘come upon the sodomitical scene from behind.’58 _{Fanny was able to ‘peep’ unobserved, but in the} context of the museum or gallery, this is not the case. I am seen to look, I am ‘caught looking’. As a spectator, I am defined by my act of looking and the visibility of that looking, within the gallery space, perhaps inhibits me from fully and

55

Barthes, Roland Barthes, p72.

56 _{Nancy K. Miller “‘I’s in Drag: The Sex of Recollection”, cited in Edelman, Homographesis,}

p186.

57

Ibid. p186.

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107 comfortably occupying the privileged and fully subjective spectatorial position. I still feel very female.

The spectatorial position of woman in a queer homoerotic environment is figured by Doyle as one of empowerment, but without any recourse to the role reversal of looking ‘in drag’. Doyle envisages it as an opportunity for straight pleasure; to run an eye over the male body with impunity. Citing the work of film theorist, Laura Marks on gay porn, she suggests that; ‘some people may intensely enjoy haunting spaces in which they are invisible (or at least differently visible), and consuming images not only not intended for them but not interested in representing them and their desires.’59 _{Doyle argues that a queer homoerotic space is not experienced by} woman as an asexual place, but actually, one in which her sexual subjectivity is ‘acknowledged in all its unruliness’ and that she freely enjoys her subjectivity as time out from her objectivity; that is, as a sex object.60 But if, in this space she is

invisible, who acknowledges her unruly sexual subjectivity? Who sees her at all?

Doyle and Marks both argue that the female spectator in gay male spaces enjoys a mobility in the freedom from connoting ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, and with that mobility comes power, to run amok, to haunt, to see without being seen. But it seems to be a restricted freedom, a kind of impotent power that in this space lacks agency. As Marks writes; ' . . . this power is short-term and contingent as any other kind of looking.' Although I would not argue that the freedom of the female spectator in the queer environment of Gilbert & Georgeworld is casual in embarrassment per se, it is on the brink of embarrassment because it brings about an intense self-

59

Doyle, Sex Objects, ppxxvi,xxvii.

60 _{Doyle writes; ‘The insertion of herself into a queer homoerotic environment is not a retreat}

from the sexual. For this woman, finding herself in a queer space can be sexually empowering – it may be the only space in which her sexuality is acknowledged in all its unruliness; or it may be a space in which she feels like a sexual subject precisely because she is not a sex object.’ Ibid. ppxxvi,xxvii.

108 consciousness. Although I, as the spectator, am invisible to the male subjects and objects that are each to the other reversible; I see me. And I know that I am also ‘caught looking’. In the same way that in embarrassment the self experiences being everything and nothing, in embarrassment the self may feel both hyper-visible and invisible. In the imaginary space of spunkland, I am intensely aware of seeing myself seeing, and it is I who must acknowledge my unruly sexual subjectivity. I might haunt the margins of Gilbert & George’s scenes of masculinity, as Marks says, ‘dropping in on other desiring gazes’, but my marginality, my without-ness, is mine, returning me always to myself as a mere borrower.61

Alex Bacon argues that gender and sexuality are determining factors in establishing a spectatorial viewpoint in relation to Gilbert & George. He makes the point that the masculinities ‘framed’ by their work are unstable, or ‘shaky’ as a result of their excesses. The excessiveness of their images applies certainly to gender and sexuality but also to class, patriotism, blackness, whiteness, symbolism, faith and shit which are frequently overdetermined, and so complicate the picture. The excess of masculinity implicates the spectator in objectification of, or identification with, the image so that; ‘the particular ways in which the viewer is figured and implicated in their seeing of the work mean that they must at least provisionally, momentarily, even antagonistically, encounter a gay male gaze which here does not