As I'm writing this, I'm thinking of new wrinkles smoothed out by my initial polemic. Significantly, the males pictured within the Anthropologie holiday catalogue are not wearing anything for sale. On the one hand, the fact that it is only the woman who serves as a mannequin reinforces the blurring of the line between property and person in a gender-specific manner. Her appearance can be "bought" in a way that the males' appearance cannot. This interpretation reinforces my conviction that the catalogue promotes a patriarchal vision of women as property. On the other hand, the fact that the males function as mere props within a circuit of consumer desire routed through the woman's body could be read as a sign that they have been even more thoroughly reified than she has.
In my last entry I mentioned thinking of John Berger's Ways of Seeing -- actually, he makes a point of noting that it's a collaborative venture with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb and Richard Hollis -- which devotes a good deal of attention to the representation of women in Western art. I was thinking of passages like this one:
[NOTE: The reproductions of Titian's Venus of Urbino and Manet's Olympia stand in for the B+W ones in the original text, itself based on a BBC television series]Written for a broad audience, attempting to distill complex theoretical points into accessible language, Ways of Seeing opens itself up to criticism from those who are willing to zoom in close enough to see the cracks in its surface of well-meaning generalizations. From my perspective, though, the argument still works as a polemical "establishing shot." For all the changes in gender relations over the past three-plus decades since the book was published, I still think it safe to say that most images of women, particularly in the commercial sphere, still presume an ideal spectator who is male, even if their actual spectators are going to be primarily female. "They do to themselves what men do to them." Not every woman. Not always. But often enough.
In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.
In modern art the category of the nude has become less important. Artists themselves began to question it. In this, as in many other respects, Manet represented a turning point. If one compares his Olympia with Titian's original, one sees a woman, cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewhat defiantly.The ideal was broken. But there was little to replace it except the "realism" of the prostitute -- who became the quintessential woman of early avant-garde twentieth-century painting. (Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Rouault, German Expressionism, etc.) In academic painting this tradition continued.
Today the attitudes and values which informed that tradition are expressed through other more widely diffused media -- advertising, journalism, television.
But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men -- not because the feminine is different from the masculine -- but because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.
This brings me back to the Anthropologie holiday catalogue, which I characterized as "pornographic" because it doesn't even need to present the woman in a state of undress in order to expose her to the gaze of what Berger and his collaborators call "spectator-owners."
In one of her comments on my last entry,
_luaineach noted that she disagreed with my characterization of the woman in the image as a mother. "For one, she's way too young. For two, she's wearing jeans. And no mom that would be making her kid put on a tie for wherever they are going would be wearing jeans there herself. So, from my perspective you've got the 15 year old sister coaxed into the family picture when she's in a pissy mood because she doesn't want to go spend the day with relatives in the first place." At first, I was inclined to reply that the rest of the catalogue makes it clear that she is, in fact, a mother figure, adding that the fact that she appears "way too young" powerfully strengthens the image's troubling undercurrents. But then I thought about it some more and realized that, though there is plenty of evidence -- evidence which _luaineach hadn't seen until now -- to support my conclusion, there is no way of being certain. When I showed the catalogue to Kim, she commented that it looked to her like the new wife, mistress, or au pair of the man pictured, dealing with the tensions that come with a new family arrangement. This is another example, in short, of the way that images resist the imposition of a single meaning._luaineach's "way too young" provided a shortcut to what makes the images in the Anthropologie catalogue so unsettling. She could be an older, teenage half-sister, but that would raise the specter of incest:The longer I think about the images in the Anthropologie holiday catalogue, the more I have to say. But it's time to move on to other tasks. I suppose what continues to eat away at me is the thought that there are plenty of people out there who find this sort of scene stimulating, both to their consumer and sexual desire, without ever stopping to think about the why and how of that response; who may be unsettled -- every stimulation represents a disruption of the status quo, after all -- without being conscious of that change of state; who settle all too easily into the slot prepared for them by the marketing division at companies like Anthropologie. Maybe there are fewer people who fit that description than I fear. Or maybe those people who are stimulated by catalogues like this one are able to confine that stimulation to a small portion of their everyday lives. Maybe they know that they do to themselves what others do to them, but also know how to stop doing it when it becomes a problem. I certainly hope so.
