In an attempt to get clear about Peggy Brand’s defense of
disinterestedness I explore her concept of toggling and suggest a way to clear
up problems. It is not simply that
looking at the painting or the performance piece would open the feminist up to
more experiences of a formalist sort but that there are other layers of meaning
that enhance and enrich the experience of any viewer as we work through the
different forms of attention, both interested and disinterested. The enhancement by what Brand, perhaps
misleadingly, calls “toggling” is not just additive but transformative in a
progressive way.
This is an attempt to get clear about Peggy Brand's defense
of disinterestedness in her paper "Disinterestedness and Political
Art" which appears in Carolyn Korsmeyer's Aesthetics: The Big Questions. The basic claim is that political art in
general and feminist art in particular can be appreciated not only in an
interested manner but in a disinterested manner, in fact that it should be
appreciated in both ways: both
disinterestedness and interestedness afford, taken together, the "fullest
and fairest experience of a work of art."
The initial question to answer is why Brand, a feminist, would want to
leave room for disinterested perception, which she herself labels as
masculinist. I think that Brand's
approach is mostly correct, but sorting out the actual argument for it is
difficult, and there are some ambiguities that need to be resolved. A clue comes in her discussion of the history
of the concept of disinterestedness. She
observes that disinterestedness was "both a moral and an aesthetic
ideal" opposed to "private interest" and "serving one's own
ends." It was contrasted with the desire to possess the object. Relating this to the beautiful in women, we
find that in Burke's writing the female body is only perceived as beautiful
"if the sole interest of the perceiver is in perceiving for its own sake
and not in the desire for possession." (156)
Although Brand does not make this clear (and may not be
aware of it herself), the original motive of disinterestedness was in the right
direction from the standpoint of feminism. Perceiving a woman for her own sake
and not as a possession is perceiving her as having her own ends. That is,
disinterested attention, directed by men towards women is actually conducive to
feminism both on an ethical and on an aesthetic level. This establishes that disinterested
perception has some value, even in the 18th century version, although during
that period it was not always practiced with honesty. In observing the female nude a
"natural" reaction for a heterosexual male is sexually interested (I
am not sure why Brand puts "natural" in quotes here.) A much more problematic reaction is desire to
possess and exploit the woman under question.
Disinterested perception breaks or at least brackets these predispositions.
Brand then discusses this issue in relation to Arnheim's
discussion of Ingres' La Source. Arnheim is concerned that the image is so
lifelike and sensuous that it makes "the observer almost forget that he is
looking at" a work of art. Brand observes that the male observer has an
"automatic response to the sexuality depicted" and it is difficult to
be disinterested as a result. So, Arnheim's response is initially
"unabashedly interested." Nonetheless Arnheim is subsequently able to
focus on formal properties of the painting, i.e. the devices that make it
"such a complete representation of life." Brand observes that he is
able to isolate and interpret these properties because, as he says in another
book, he can "peel off the context" to perceive the object "as
though it existed in complete isolation" i.e. by way of "an
abstraction" blocking associations with, as Brand puts it, "actual
nude girls."
This attempt to achieve mastery over one's own bodily
response is, however, seen by most feminists as masculinist and as wrongful
psychological censure.[1] But Brand sees it as useful for the purposes
of feminism. It is not that she thinks
that the observer can become totally neutral and unbiased or that one can
become an unflawed mirror (as Stolnitz thought): her view is that one can be disinterested in
a relatively weak way, although, as we shall see, this is a weak way of putting
the point.
Brand's main example is the work of Orlan called The Reincarnation of St. Orlan, a
performance work in which Orlan seeks to represent "an ideal formulated by
male desire" using the medium of her own body to deconstruct such images of
women, and she does this by way of submitting herself to surgery. The goal is to get women to not engage in
reconstructive surgery.
There are a lot of issues here but I want to keep to the
question of the value of disinterestedness for the feminist. One very effective way to discuss this issue
is to focus on one image from Orlan's piece:
a scene from "Seventh Plastic Surgical Operation," Nov. 21,
1993.
The issue Brand raises is whether the empathy we naturally
feel towards this woman under surgery should be or even can be blocked in order
to perceive her disinterestedly, i.e. in such a way as to be fascinated by the
"compositions of lights and darks" and by the
"indecipherable" nature of the instruments and body parts.
Brand claims that she is taking a position "between the
two extremes: the traditional
endorsement of masculinist disinterestedness ...and its feminist
antithesis." She is arguing for
reconfiguring the masculinist approach "along revisionist lines."
This can be achieved by "toggling" between the interested and
disinterested approaches. (We shall see later that “toggling” is not quite the
right metaphor for what Brand proposes.)
Now with respect to the image here: "seeing a still photograph out
of its original context - a videotape of the surgical process - a viewer of a
single image documenting Orlan's 'Omnipresence' scrambles to clarify the
ambiguities of what is seen."
We need to bear in mind (Brand does not mention this) that
single shots like this are often considered part of the artwork, or one way of
perceiving the artwork, when it comes to performance pieces. In other words the performance is the event
plus the still shots, often framed in galleries, and so forth. The artwork is a collection of various
related items and events.
Interested attention (IA) occurs when one empathizes with
the artist (or with the woman pictured, if one does not know her identity), but
"a quick reminder that the image is a work of art and not just a picture
of someone's cosmetic surgery might cause another reversal, this time a
disengagement with the rapport one has established - a reversal of personal
interest - to an intellectual engagement with the content of the work of
art" i.e. recognition of Orlan's goal to "deconstruct mythological
images of women" --- this would be Disinterested attention (DA) in the
revisionist mode: that is, such attention would "engage intellectually and
disengage emotionally" with the work.
Things may be a bit confusing here. So I will hypothesize what I think Brand is
getting at. Let us posit the movement
here as one that begins with the interested attention that goes along with the exploitive
male gaze (Orlan is seen as properly enhancing her features through plastic
surgery in order to better accommodate male desire) followed by disinterested
attention of the classic sort in which the image of Orlan is seen in terms of
lines and colors in certain relations and in which the initial male gaze is
bracketed, followed by a feminist interested perception, in which Orlan is seen
with sympathy, followed finally by a feminist disinterested perception which
incorporates feminist theory, a kind of move to greater objectivity. The entire
sequence is hardly the same as toggling a light switch: for. although it goes from IA to DA to IA and
back to DA, the IAs and DAs are different.
Going back to La
Source, one can attend to the work using both DA and IA. In DA one can focus on the color, texture and
balance of the painting, and from IA (of the feminist sort) one can note that
it objectifies the male gaze.
There is much rather confusing talk in Brand's paper about
psychologically ambiguous images such as the famous duck/rabbit, old woman, and
pronged figures. Her idea is that we
perceive similarities between our mental sets and what we disambiguate
(168). She notes that in the
psychological perceptual experiment using pronged figures when we get
disambiguating visual cues we will read the pronged figures one way rather than
another, and that "unambiguous sexualized predispositions" similarly
explain the tendency for males like Arnheim to see La Source originally in a sexualized way. (Why Brand believes that male sexualized
predispositions are unambiguous is beyond me.) DA then allows them to switch
and see it in another way, and presumably opens them up (although this is not
explained in this article) to a second form of IA which is feminist. I think the best way to deal with this
material on perceptual ambiguity is to skip through it quickly since there is,
after all, no cumulative aesthetic value in switching between the different
ways of seeing the ambiguous pictures studied by psychologists.
Brand then tells us that "What is taking place [in the
first DA] is a deliberate dis-ing of the gazer's tendency to use, take
advantage of, desire, or possess the girl that is pictured [in the Ingres
painting]; it is an attempt to be open
to receiving all the impressions that the work can provide. It is a shift toward the eighteenth-century
concept of disinterestedness, which is clearly a denial of Arnheim's initial
and intrusive interests: an attraction
to the work's sensuality..." As a
heterosexual male I take offense at the idea that my way of looking at women I find
sexually desirable is always associated with the desire to exploit and
dominate, that I am incapable of a sexualized look that is also caring or
respectful, and therefore that in order to appreciate The Nude I have to set aside these naturally exploitative
desires. I do not have to be masculinist
to be masculine, although I recognize that we all may have unconscious
masculinist prejudices. But let’s set
that aside for more interesting issues.
I think I can clear up one point here. Brand sees those habituated to the male gaze
as having to "sort through the confusion of interpretations" of the
image of the Ingres nude and the image of the bruised Orlan. The interpretations in question of the nude
are simply those of masculinist IA vs. classical DA. The Orlan case is a bit more complicated as
she does not present herself on the operating table as an attractive object for
the masculinist IA, or rather, she does only ironically presents herself as
such, since for example she is “made up” even though on the operating table,
whereas in fact, under the male gaze she can only be seen as sexually unattractive unlike the nude in The Source. So the confusion here is significantly
different in type in each case.
In her essay Brand sets up Arnheim as a kind of hero, for
unlike such disinterestedness theorists as Alison and Stolnitz, he saw that the
work does not simply "yield" an impression but rather that a process
of abstraction/subtraction is needed to attain DA. This process, she argues, actually adds to
his experience of the painting thus making him "more open to all the
impressions that the work might provide." Brand will use this idea to
construct a new level of DA for the feminist, one that comes after the feminist
IA.
However, as Brand correctly observes, the initial DA, even
that of Arnheim, does not provide a full experience of the work, since it
blocks significance that can only be regained by "imaginative exercise of
IA" i.e. a switch not only away from conditioned viewing of the image
formed by the male gaze but to viewing the girl, in the case of The Source, as "embarrassed by her
nakedness." Such a switch, Brand thinks, opens one to "more
impressions than ever before."
What I had not realized on my first reading of Brand but
which is now apparent, is that the second, feminist, IA is a matter of adding a context, of telling a story,
one that may or may not be literally true....it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter whether Ingres’ model
actually had the feelings of being embarrassed by her nakedness. What matters
is that she can easily be seen under this story since this story is true to a
common or general experience of women who suffer under the exploitative male
gaze. That is why Brand refers to it as
"the imaginative exercise of IA."
So, rather than subtracting context, which Arnheim recommended for IA,
this is a matter of adding context, of "building" interest, one that
opens the viewer to more impressions.
So the process Brand envisions is from IA to DA and then to
IA (the feminist IA that adds context), and then, but Brand neglects to make
this entirely clear, back to DA again by way of a bracketing of the emotional
level of response in order to attain the feminist intellectual level. This comes out, rather vaguely, when she says,
"The feminist viewer of Ingre's nude or Orlan's surgeries - whose tendency
is to adopt a more physically and bodily based interested stance (IA) like
Arnheim's - may also benefit from the lesson of undergoing an intellectualizing
and abstracting process" i.e. of moving to the second, feminist DA. The is confused by the fact that Orlan does
not adapt an IA like Arnheim's since she explicitly offers her performance
pieces as representing an ideal formulated by male desire and as having the
goal of discouraging women from reconstructive surgery. So, the images from Orlan's performance can
now be seen in terms of the feminist theories of Mulvey and the feminist
intentions of Orlan herself. For Brand,
the benefit of DA for the feminist observer is the "intellectualizing and
abstracting process" not made available through the IA of feminist
empathy. Where Brand goes wrong, and
against her own intentions, is to think of the feminist as somehow benefiting
from the classical IA in a direct way, saying that "the feminist who looks
upon Ingres' nude formalistically is self-consciously and deliberately shedding
her feminist lens to view the work as disinterestedly as possible." The problem here is with the notion of
"shedding her feminist lens."
Brand mistakes her own theory when she says that, for the
feminist, "[v]iewing La Source
in terms of geometry and color adds to the variety of experiences she [the
feminist] gains from the piece."
(168) That is confusing the
feminist IA with the original IA. Brand
just thinks her own "revised" DA may be more difficult when it comes
to political art since, in the case of Orlan, one needs to "shift toward
viewing bloody facial features as combinations of reds and purples, darks and
lights..." This is coupled in
Brand's mind with a "shift to reflection on the concept of women and of
art exploited by the performance series."
Yet just seeing the facial features in formalist terms is not the goal
at all. The goal is to see them in terms
of the feminist IA and DA. Brand is just
confusing the traditional formalist perception advocated by Clive Bell and the
intellectualist perception informed by feminist theory.
There is a deep reason for this and it has to do with
Brand's misconception of her own idea of toggling. Briefly, the move from IA to DA to feminist IA
and then to feminist DA is not a matter of just switching perspectives. The previous perceptions are carried into the later ones in a way
very unlike the ambiguous figures which had so misled Brand, and very much like
what John Dewey refers to when he speaks of the flow of art experience being
one that carries the past into the present and projects into the future. When, in looking at the photograph of Orlan's
performance, one is "looking at bloody facial features as combinations of
red and purples" this is not a matter of replacing the one form of
perception with the other but rather of being very aware that these are bloody
facial features as we attend to them formalistically: you can't stop thinking of the fact that they
are bloody facial features. There is no purely formalist way to look at this
photograph, nor do I think we should even try.
The reds and purples take on a different look, a different intensity,
when we know they are reds and purples of rendered human flesh, just as the
initial awareness that this is human flesh is intensified when we focus on the
formalist aspect of the work. These reds
and purples take on a different meaning again (and, let me suggest, increase in
intensity) when we understand the entire performance under the feminist
intentions of Orlan. The process is not
just one of opening up to new experiences, but cumulative.
Brand’s conclusion is not as powerful as it should be. It is not simply that looking at the painting
or the performance piece would open the feminist up to more experiences of a
formalist sort but that there are other layers of meaning that enhance and
enrich the experience as we work through them.
Further, some aspect of this is even to be found in the original
construction of DA in the 18th century as we look at it now under contemporary
lenses, insofar as it was directed against seeing things in terms of ego and
possession and moved ethically towards treating the object portrayed as a thing
in itself. My conclusion is that the "toggling" (perhaps mislabeled
because of its association with a mere on/off switch) Brand describes is a way
to deepen our understanding of a work and that the enhancement by toggling is
not just additive but transformative in a progressive way. This has implications that go far beyond
debates over feminist interpretation since Brand's concept of toggling between
DA and IA contributes to resolving the great debate between formalism and
contextualism.
[1] lt
seems peculiar that feminists would have a problem with men censoring feelings
that have negative implications for women.
I wonder whether Brand has these other feminists right here.
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