The Modern Female Grotesque

This is my literary contribution to our oral presentation.

We have selected a few of the illustrations Sander L. Gillman included in her article ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexulality in late 19^th century Art, Medicine, and Culture’ to exemplify the icon of the female grotesque. These are explicit cases of the categorisation of the female body, specifically here, the black and the prostitute’s body.

Gillman focuses on the development and utilisation of the icon of the black and sexualised body and how it operated in art, culture and medicine in the late 19^th century. This is a room of articles rather than distinct art pieces; the medical journal illustrations in particular, are an important inclusion as their very nature gives them higher, and subliminally factual status above the aesthetic subjectivity of paintings.

‘Icons represent rather than present the world’. J.J. Virey, an 18^th century writer of race studies heavily contributed to the ideology surrounding the Hottentot female body, by attributing physiology to physiognomy and thereby explaining a pseudo-scientific trait of heightened sexuality. For example, due to the slightly elongated labia, and the supposed ‘over development of the clitoris’ of one examined indigenous female, Sarah Bartmann, an animalistic style of sexuality became a logical alignment. She was reduced to her sexual parts and developed into the icon used for the black female throughout the 19^th century. This is what is particularly important about the illustrations on display in our exhibition of the ‘Female Grotesque’. ‘The Hottentot Venus’, for example, is an image used by Saartjie Baartman in his 1810 exhibition, which caused outright scandal due partly to the recent abolishment of slavery, and her openly displayed nakedness. There was a sense of a connection in the public’s reactionary attitude to her ‘lewdness’ and her ethnicity. Something particularly telling in the Parisian reception of the image, used at a ball given by the Duchess Du Barry in 1829, was that ‘The Hottentot Venus’ was somewhat of a prize winning attraction, which invokes the concept of the carnavalesque and the freak show. The composition of vaginal illustrations objectify almost to the extent of something you might come across in a curiosity shop. This entrenches the idea of otherness, and an ideological bias and implicit fear of and against the female sex.

The poor treatment of Sarah Bartman threw our inclusion of Kara Walker’s still from her film ‘8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker’ into an ethical disrepute. In one respect it may be disrespectful to exhibit such images in relation to one another, only repeating and perpetuating what we originally set out to expose and disprove- the iconography of the sexualised body. On the other hand however, it is important to bring to an audience’s attention, to the affect of the implication of the icon of the black body and how that has been associated with the sexualised female. Kara Walker providing an accurate, contemporary example of how this continues to manifest itself today. The artist renders exaggerated facial and bodily features in her puppets and drawings of stereotyped black caricatures. Her use of the silloutte is particularly interesting in that it corresponds to the idea of reduction; one can only view outlines, relying heavily on our ideological conditioning to identify and place the people, and their narratives, in her films and images, inadvertently highlighting the myth of difference racially and culturally, specifically between Africa and America.

The postures of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and ‘An Italian Protitute’ evoke something like a ‘mug shot’ of potential criminals- a quality that may not have been intentional upon their conception as images but certainly operates as such with our modern day visual conditioning.

The prostitute, for the 19^th century zeitgeist, was the epitome of the sexuality, which incorporated both passion and disease. Legal documentation for medical controls include the literary work of A. J. B Parent-Duchatelet, who uses the modal of public health that eluded to the idea of prostitutes being another form of pollution, implicitly comparing them to the Parisian sewers. He also presented various inherent traits of the prostitute’s appearance to their occupation; black thick hair, a strong jaw, a hard spent glance’ Such features also fulfil Virey’s categories applied to the Hottentot female thereby establishing the link between the black and the white body, producing the icons of sexualised women.

This is explicitly illustrated in Manet’s ‘Olympia’. We have placed the painting in the introductory room of our exhibition almost as an icon itself, to visually establish for the viewer, the themes we are concentrating on- the prostitute and the grotesque. Here, the linkage is made between the icons of the black servant girl, and the white sexualised woman both representing the ills of a specific aspect of late 19^th century society, signified by the combination of the two categories of degenerate women.

Bibliography

Clark, T.J. Olympia’s Choice from ‘The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers’ 1984

Clayson, Hollis ‘Painted Love’, New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, c1991

Douglas, Mary ‘Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo’, Routledge, 2002

Gilman, Sander L. ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies; toward an iconography of female sexuality in the late 19^th century’ from Henry Louis Gates Jnr, “Race”, Writing and Difference’ 1989

Gillman, Sander L. ‘Disease and Representation; Images from Madness to AIDS’, Cornell University Press, Ithica and London, 1988

Krauss, Rosalind, A Voyage on the North Sea; Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition’, Thames & Hudson, 1999

Nead, Lynda, ‘The Female Nude; Art, Obscenity and Sexuality.’, Routledge, London, New York, 1992

Wright, Thomas ‘A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art’, Fredrick Ungar Publishing co. New York, 1969

Keyser, Wolfgang, ‘The Grotesque in Art and Literature’, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1963