New Perspective on nudes

Mary Sara

Yorkshire Post, Monday April 4 1994

Should we question the presence in our galleries of female nudes by make artists? Is it a worthwhile exercise to invite contemporary female artists to respond to and intervene with their own works in response to the display of such objects?

The answer on both counts, must be yes, when the resulting art is as articulate and sensitively made as that by Sheila Gaffney and Linda Schwab currently at Leeds City Art Gallery.

Antonio Canova’s copy of the antique statue of Venus in the Uffizi, carved in 1818 for an English connoisseur, should raise questions among females today. Although such men talked of sculpture in terms of skill and art, there is no doubt that possessing a life-size nude female, sensuously detailed, smoothly caressable and available only to their private gaze, was what they sought.

Canova’s marble Venus was not an it, but a she. Linda Schwab has emphasised voyeuristic activities by surrounding the statue with peephole screens made of sugar – a substance not unlike plaster of marble when it is hard, and redolent of virginal sweetness. Around them she has placed viewing chairs, as if for the viewers, but they are draped like skirted ladies waiting to be asked to dance – or something.

She makes her point with wit and restraint whereas all too often the message of the politically correct artists is drowned by the noise of anger and the art gets overwhelmed by argument.

It makes more enemies than friends for its cause and this is true of many artists, male and female, who, wanting to convey their strong passions and opinions, forget that to alienate their audience is not a good starting point from which to influence it.

While we should judge foremost whether their productions work as art, we should then also beware of accepting its respectability or worth merely by virtue of its display in an institution.

If this is patently true of contemporary art, it is no less true of the art of the past. The truth is that Canova’s Venus is, or could be, as offensive to female gallery goers today as a Page Three girl thrust in front of their faces on a bus.

It should also make men question their response, even now. Just because it has been around for a long time does not mean we have to like it of what it stands for, but making a work of art about the problem is far better than holding seminars, advocating censorship – or throwing things.

Linda Schwab’s own painting, Bedhead, overlooks the subversive activity going on around Venus in the centre of the gallery and makes wry comments about art history (i.e. the male version) by her use of a quotation from another manmade Venus, Titian’s this time.

Sheila Gaffney’s installation, Studiolo, is harder to find (in the sculpture gallery near the big Epstein) and understand, but it is equally worth taking trouble with. As well as collecting voluptuous marbles, 18th-century gentlemen gathered curios both artistic, scientific and historic for their private delectation in a sort of mini-museum sometimes called a “wunderkammer”.

Gaffney has filled a small windowed room with sculptures of figures ancient and modern in the form of casts and bronzes and fragments of stone. She has added her own female figures made of wax, a material that always looks attractive but feels less so and which conjures notions of burning, melting and ritual.

The figures are schematic rather than realistic and deliberately frontal while being totally unseductive, they might be erotic fetishes but for their “don’t touch” surfaces and situation behind glass.

She makes her point about the point of view of the viewer or possessor intelligently and the combination of integrity of purpose and elegance of crafting means that both women’s works stand up well among the gallery’s paintings and sculptures by highly respectable and respected artists of the past.

So is it any more than cranky to ask that we re-evaluate past work of art for political correctness? We can, of course, still enjoy Canova’s craftsmanship and if we wish, admire Venus’s idealised beauty, but I think we should be questioning how far we have really travelled when we live in a society that can avail itself of graphic pornography at every turn.

Some progress has been made, of a sort. Twentieth-century voyeurs may still do it in secret but at least we don’t have the objects of their obsession on view in our art galleries.
Wunderkammer