Invitations and Becomings

In preparation for a trip to the MCA later today, I've been reading up on the work of Julie Rrap, whose work is on show in a retrospective exhibition called Body Double. I just want to riff for a moment on a point made in the MCA's Education Kit, i.e. that despite the fact that Rrapp's body appears in almost every one of her photographic works, she does not regard herself as undertaking a project of self-portraiture.

The idea of being able to enact a presentation of one's own body without engaging in self-portraiture seems paradoxical. After all, how could a portrayal of one's own body by oneself be anything but self-portraiture?

Naturally, I hear resonances with the method of phenomenology here. In particular, Rrap's refusal to equate her portrayal of her own body with self-portraiture reminds me of the distinction between phenomenology and introspective psychology. Phenomenology may (and if Husserl is right, must) always begin with the first-personal, but that does not mean that it is in the business of providing introspective reports or first-personal data. It is an inquiry that begins with oneself, without for all that providing psychological data about oneself (i.e. constructing a self-portrait).

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Aside: Maybe I'm just being parochial about philosophy, but I find the way critic's convert artists into philosophers quite annoying. Consider this sentence by the curator of the exhibition:

"Drawing on the notion that gender is in itself a performance, Rrap has forged the theme of the stand-in, a prosthetic body double, and her works often invite viewers to imagine themselves in such a role."

I'm probably just being parochial, because what annoys me is the phrase "drawing on the notion...". I suppose I balk at the idea of art having conceptual motives, as though the artwork were the conclusion of an argument.

Now, obviously, to imagine that artists qua artists (whatever that means) are somehow purified of any conceptual or literary context is naive (rien hors de texte, n'est pas?), yet I just can't see how this context can function as a rational ground or justification.

I'm encouraged by Rrap's own comments on the issue:

"One has to realise that at that point [feminism] had hardly been spoken about – not in this country, not in relation to the visual arts. But we’re speaking as if I was conscious of all this at the time, and I wasn’t. It was synchronicity—there are moments when things happen together and complement and enhance one another.
People were becoming aware that you can’t look at an image, especially an image of a
woman, with innocent eyes…It was a few years down the track before this sort of work
[involving the naked female body and made by women] got taken into the mainstream of feminist practice and suddenly I became an accepted figure in the feminist movement. But people forget that artists have their own motivations for doing things, which may coincide from time to time with larger agendas and rhetoric from other areas."

It's those artistic motivations that get swamped by well-meaning critics, who want to articulate those motivations in philosophical terms. This is really philosophy at its worst. It smacks of the kind of hypostatising function that Merleau-Ponty described in terms of Reason as the Museum, embalming everything in its path (M-P had Hegel in mind, probably unfairly). It makes sense of things by killing them dead.

The problem with this way of talking about art is that, if that's all that was meant by the artwork, one wonders why the artist didn't just say that, rather than going to all the trouble (hers and ours) of creating a work that requires serious interpretive effort to articulate the same point.

The whole problem reminds me of Bergson's point about time. If time is just like space, if the relationship between moments is just like the relationship between frames in a film, then what difference does the unfolding make? The conceptualisation of artistic motives robs art of its temporality. I don't mean just the temporality of the creative act, although that shouldn't be underestimated. I mean also the future of the art work itself. The very fact that art is and should be indigestible in the present. It should remain on the horizon of our understanding of ourselves and our world. To pretend we have captured its potential entirely in conceptual terms is basically to say that it's influence is exhausted, and to wash our hands of it.

All of which makes me wonder how artists cope with well-meaning and often complimentary critics, who praise their work while they bury it alive.