on distance cues approximating normal sight, which recognises the sexed body
as female either as a whole or an imaginary sum of discernible parts. The degree
of eroticisation depends, of course, on the nature and behaviour of that body,
but once it is taken outside the limits of the erotic visual field, conventional
readings begin to break down.
The body in proximity, the close-up, may well suggest the entitlement of
the viewer, as Peggy Phelan has suggested, but when abstracted in extreme
close-up it becomes indecipherable and is more likely to establish ownership
by the woman who examines herself rather than the rights of her male viewers.
In Holland, from the mid 1970s, Nan Hoover took advantage of the built-in
close-up lens of the video camera to disrupt the unity of the female body. She
made black and white videotapes of her own body subject to a magnification
such that the usual signifiers of gender and age dissolved and transformed
her body into the primordial landscape of recesses, creases and forests that
we all consist of at a microscopic level. In Landscape (1983), the occasional
e
y
elash slamming down on an expanse of flesh nonetheless marks Hoover as
female, but a gigantesque feminine, abstracted and alarmingly primal, the stuff
of infantile
nightmares rather than the reduced performances of sexuality that
establish men’s mastery over their ‘living dolls’ in their adult years.
My own There is a Myth (1984) was an attempt to unfix conventional
structures of erotic meaning by isolating the breast from its host body whilst
still creating sensual images of the female body. Women’s breasts are rarely seen
as the original object of desire, sustenance and comfort to the infant. In most
western countries, it is not acceptable for women to breastfeed in public places,
images of the breast being restricted to sexual hot spots in the iconography of
men’s magazines, advertising and fashion. The breast in Myth was, to a degree,
abstr
acted,
offering a perfect target for the gaze and in its reference to Jasper
Johns’ target paintings, part of an existing modernist aesthetic. If these works
closed in on the body and through various levels of abstraction occluded the
established referents of sexual identity, then Mona Hatoum went a step further
ten years later. Exploiting the development of video technology in the medical
field, Hatoum used an endoscopic camera in Corps Etranger (1994) to slide away
from the body’s external casing and take the viewer inside the body travelling
through its labyrinthine passages and organs, which were, at this range, so
indefinable as to be any-body’s. Corps Etranger was a fundamental assertion of
our common physiology subverting any attempt to name and codify the artist’s
gender and societal position in terms of perceived biology whilst re-asserting
her identity as, by then, a successful woman artist.
All these works sidestep conventional sexual marking by subjecting the
body to metaphorical transformation, from woman into landscape, breast into
minimalist target, outside into universal, visceral interior. This is achieved
whilst retaining a sense of female presence not least because of the culturally
D I S R U P T I N G T H E C O N T E N T • 4 9