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So now I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada for another Hand of Man gig. What a strange place.
When I was living in New York City in my early 20's I had an ongoing joke with some friends that there was a warehouse somewhere where all the beautiful women were kept. They were brought out only briefly for advertising campaigns or photo and film shoots. Or maybe... I realize 30 years later... maybe they were kept in that warehouse for their own protection...
In contrast to my political rant of a few weeks ago, this post will be more about questions than answers... When it comes to politics, I know that I am right (but doesn't everybody "know" that they are right?), but when it comes to gender politics, I'm just a question asker, a student.
This coming weekend, while I am running the Hand of Man at one of the largest music festivals in the entire world in Las Vegas, Christina and I will also have several sculptures set up at one of the smallest, at a music venue in Taos. For the event in Taos I brought out several old sculptures, but I also wanted to do a little something that was new. In the spirit of strong and empowered women I decided to pose two store mannequins next to two of my old robots, each mannequin playing the role of Amazon robot trainer, or robot overlord. The Amazons were to hold the robots on leashes, making clear their position of power. And, borrowing from the aesthetic lineage of Wonder Woman while also sexing it up a bit, I sewed minimalist bras and skirts and wrist cuffs for them.
(Bras are difficult, but sewing this stuff was really fun)
I set up all the sculptures on Monday of this week, and the robots and their Amazon overlords were among the first I set up. During the brief few hours they were set up, Christina and I heard a bewildering array of bizarre and off-color comments about them. Most of these comments were fundamentally misogynist, one comment was downright creepy, and another was even directed at Christina.
I removed the mannequins on Monday evening and by Tuesday morning I'd decided that I would not be reinstalling them for the festival. The robots will have no trainers.
Somehow these paragons of female beauty opened the doors to some very weird corners of the people who sauntered by - doors which are usually kept closed by the pressures of socialization and good manners and common sense - and this has really gotten me thinking...
In 1974, acclaimed Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 0, a performance in which she stood still for six hours amongst a public audience while they were invited to "perform acts" upon her with a group of 72 objects laid out on a table. The objects included honey, a feather, razor blades, and a gun with a single bullet. In that time she was written on, her clothes were cut from her body, her skin was cut with razor blades, her body was subjected to minor sexual indignities, and the loaded gun was held to her head by one member of the audience. Another person intervened and wrestled the gun away. When the six hours were over and Marina finally moved -finally acted like a person again, the audience scrambled away... unable to face her.
Marina Abramović is, not coincidentally (to my discussion, anyway), a beautiful woman, and was arguably even more beautiful 45 years ago in 1974.
What if the performer of this courageous act had been a man?
Would the male body be treated with such disrespect?
What if it had been an unattractive woman? Or a black man?
(I think that among other things, Abramović's experiment proved that people are cowardly animals.)
Beautiful women are like unicorns - they are rare (Although they are less rare in certain places such as, ironically, New York City, where I proposed the warehouse theory. And another point; if you only looked at advertising, you would think natural beauties were everywhere. But the reality on the streets is different.)
They are like polar bears - they are the canvas onto which we project all sorts of hopes, fears, and hyperbole.
And the conventional wisdom is that beautiful people are treated better than others, but I think beauty can also bring out the ugly side of people... like Trump, or the internet.
Why is this?
Why is beauty so charged, so potent, so divisive?
One answer, at least insofar as the negative effects that beauty have on women, seems to be that beauty is held up as an (unattainable?) ideal to which all women should aspire, and those who do not meet conventional definitions of beauty are somehow considered less valid, or less worthy. This is a problem no matter which way you look at it, and when magnified through the prism of social media can become a life-threatening danger. One in eight UK adults consider killing themselves over body-image issues.
And on a certain level all of this must be seen as driven by men's desire for beauty, and women's desire to be desired. No wonder women fear other more beautiful women.
The male gaze dominates advertising, guaranteeing that beautiful women are ubiquitous in ads. Advertising fuels insecurity. Insecurity fuels fear and resentment.
But why does beauty bring out such base impulses in men?
I don't really know; all I can do is guess.
Beauty can make people possessive. When we see something beautiful, we want it. (Haha.. cultivate non-attachment... to beauty!)
When we can't have what we want, we get angry. Or maybe abusive.
When we see something we can't control, we get fearful. When we get fearful we get controlling, or violent. I think that on a deep level many men have a deep fear of women, because they (we) can't control them. Some men try. Some women submit. I feel sorry for all of them.
William Moulton Marston would probably postulate that this fear also derives from a dim awareness of women's innate power, and I might agree with that. Maybe men also fear their own inability to control themselves.
Men can achieve amazing things in many areas of life (and of course the same can be said of women.. but my point here is about men) such as science or law or medicine, and yet can be reduced to animalistic idiots by women. Melvil Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal System, the sophisticated library organization system still in use today across much of the world, and yet he was so unable to control himself around women that he was eventually forced out of the American Library Association!
(I've made reference several times on this blog to the fact that there was one idea that I had for an image which caused me to jump into learning to oil paint, and this theme of men being reduced to animals by beauty runs hard through that image. One day I will get it painted.)
One very old definition of beauty is "that which pleases the eye." But how can you experience the pleasure of the eye when beauty makes you want to self-harm, or makes you angry, or makes you want to possess it? I have this idea that beauty is something that everyone can and should enjoy, if only the heavy emotion around it could be eliminated. It's somehow tied, in my head, to the simplicity of the way the ancient Greeks elevated the idea of beauty, and celebrated youthfulness. Of course they didn't have social media or advertising, and I can imagine that older women felt jealous and old or ugly men felt desire and frustration even in ancient Greece, but my sense is that beauty was culturally celebrated in a more honest and simple way back then. And if that is correct, I think they had the right idea. I think that if all those complicated emotions could be removed from the perception of beauty - emotions which are at least in some small way products of our modern civilization (insofar as they are related to the possessiveness and acquisitiveness endemic to capitalism, and the negative effects of pervasive advertising), then men and women alike could perceive the beauty of a young and well-made man or woman with the same sort of sublime pleasure that comes from viewing a sunset, or a perfect seashell.
Well that would have been a great way to end the post, but I do want to add one more thing.
Las Vegas is a tremendous culture shock compared to Taos in so many ways, but one clear difference is the pervasiveness of images of beautiful women here. In fact it extends beyond just images - sex and sexiness is woven into the fabric of this place. Waitresses wear miniskirts, half-naked showgirls pose on sidewalks with passersby, and the place does not want for strip clubs.
The obvious question is: Is this progress?
I guess on some level I am just trying to process the thing with the mannequins in Taos. Taos is progressive in some ways, but not in every way; it's still a small town in rural America.
I had an interesting (though short) conversation with our friend Claire, who is here from Barcelona helping with the Hand of Man. She asked me why I was into Wonder Woman. I tried to formulate an answer around the challenges of understanding the subtleties and overlaps and boundaries between empowerment and sexiness, and she made the excellent point that a woman who is beautiful/sexy must also be empowered in order to not be perceived as an object or a victim. Beauty combined with vulnerability is asking for trouble.
And so, back to Las Vegas: Is this progress? A place like this is obviously much more accustomed to seeing strong and sexy women (and images of them) and so I don't think a pair of mannequins dressed like Amazons would necessarily elicit the same weird responses, but on the other hand the line between empowered agent and vulnerable object is thin and subtle and there must also be a very seedy underbelly to the gender interplay here.
An offhand and not-well-supported idea I've had (which might well be wrong) is that in more developed and cosmopolitan places like NYC or certain urban centers in Europe, beautiful and strong women might be more integrated into the culture, more accepted, less at-risk.
Who knows. Some people are just raised wrong. And that happens everywhere.
It must be difficult to be a woman.
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