Accompanying text by Ingrid Lyons to the group exhibition PANORAMA, at Pallas Projects Dublin, 2015, organized by Kathy Tynan and Casey Walshe
The Second Woman
The idea of a feminine style may be a contentious issue but perhaps staging an exhibition such as Panorama can generate discourse on this topic as well as fostering opportunities for the artists involved to relate to each other through their work. It provides the platform to consider interpersonal relationships among women, which is still a comparatively rare phenomenon in contemporary culture.
Ursula Le Guin, in contextualizing some of the ideas in her 1967 novel The Left Hand of Darkness described the great enabler of her career as the women’s liberation movement. It was an epiphany for Le Guin in the sense that the rise of women’s criticism, novels by other women and the general freeing of women to write as women caused her the realization that most female writers were writing as men until the 70s and that literature had, up to that point, pretty much been a male game in that canons were made and rules laid down by men. Le Guin wrote Left Hand of Darkness in 1967 at a time that people were questioning the decisive differences between man and woman. This is still a valid question that has become much deepened in the asking. Le Guin's way of asking the question back then was to write a novel about it and to pose the question; what if you took gender away, what would be left? In this way Le Guin alludes to feminine experience.
In psychoanalysis there is the idea of a residual female influence on language following on from the connection between a mother and child. Before the child begins to associate words with meaning and as signifiers they acknowledge musical and rhythmical patterns that also convey meaning. The French theorist Julia Kristeva, in her writings on the subject, acknowledges a feminine language linked to the mother’s relationship with the infant as she extends a linguistic theory that incorporates pre-language sounds and rhythm. She associates several writers with this postulation, though her selection is not exclusively compiled of female authors.
In broaching the subject of feminine experience and style it seems important to mention the Bechdel test. While the Bechdel test is not a measure of the quality of a film, or even feminist content, it is a simple way to observe gender equality in film. The Bechdel test outlines three conditions 1 - there must be at least two women in the film, 2 - who talk to each other, 3 - about something other than a man. Each year, many films fail to meet the three specifications needed to pass the test. This means that the cinema going public are less likely to encounter representations of women in relation to each other.
The filmmaker John Cassavetes has articulated the problematic aspect of such a situation. ‘I’m very worried about the depiction of women on screen. It’s gotten worse than ever and its related to their being either high or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed, with whom and how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of women as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.’
Cassavetes has, over the course of his career created a number of films with an emphasis on feminine experience. His 1977 film Opening Night follows an actress, Myrtle Gordan in her struggle to cope with her role in a play and with aging publicly. Myrtle’s chief difficulty lies in her inability to resolve differences in her own disposition and that of her onstage character. The play within the film represents a culmination of societies conviction that aging is unattractive in women. Her hysteria reaches a peak, not because of the inception of middle age but because she must come to terms with how society watches and judges her both on stage and off.
The structure of the film supports John Berger’s supposition in Ways of Seeing that women are constantly aware of being watched. The structuring of the film and its meta narrative play entitled The second woman allows for a visual depiction of Berger’s ideas relating to the manner that women perceive themselves and are perceived. It is a play within a film that incorporates a dominant theme of being watched and judged. The female characters of this film project thoughts, fears and ideals onto one another and in this sense the characters of Opening Night regard the other woman as a reflection. There is a splitting in two, a doubling that creates a mirror image of the first woman.
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing traces the reception of the painted image, its relation to society and its context in history. On the subject of the male gaze he notes ‘a woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually and so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman’.
In an exhibition of 13 artists in which many of whom are painters and all of whom are women*, it becomes useful to consider the cultural parallels mentioned above in order to approach the value of staging such an exhibition. Given that nearly all the artists involved in the exhibition are painters or display inherent painterly sensibilities through their work, the exhibition also constitutes a snapshot of work by painters that are living, or connected in some way with the city of Dublin. Panorama, by incorporating gender as one of its limitations, begins to ask questions relating to feminine experience allowing for rumination on dynamic and interaction among women via the collaborative act of staging an exhibition.
* or AFAB (assigned female at birth)