Clare Nicholls / SMP 2010 / Artist Statement

I am having a dream where all the teeth fall out of my mouth like a waterfall. I pick them off the ground and try to put them back in my gums, but another tooth pushes it out of the way. Thousands of teeth cascade out of my mouth and onto the ground. I scratch at the ground, gathering armfuls of teeth, but they are damp and covered in dirt.

Vagina dentata, the toothed vagina, is a myth with variants widespread through many cultures, including but not limited to: North and South Americas, Polynesia, India, Korea, Japan, Greece, Egypt, and Africa (Ho 44; Gingerich 220). There are disagreements about its meaning and symbolism. It is largely read as a symbol of male castration anxiety, for obvious reasons. Many attribute the vagina dentata idea to Sigmund Freud, as he was very interested in castration anxiety, but he never wrote about the myth. Freud more or less believed the opposite; the vagina was not the castrator but an example of a castrated body (the female body in Freud's conceptualization, of course, remains passive). Elizabeth Grosz writes,
"The fantasy of the vagina dentata, of the non-human status of woman as android, vampire or animal, the identification of female sexuality as voracious, insatiable, enigmatic, invisible and unknowable, cold, calculating, instrumental, castrator/decapitator of the male, dissimulatress or fake, predatory, engulfing mother, preying on male weakness, are all consequences of the ways in which male orgasm has functioned as the measure and representative of all sexualities and all modes of erotic encounter" (293).

Freud's theories certainly conceptualized female sexuality in terms of male sexuality. The female lacks a penis and therefore is envious and wants one. She has little to no sexual desire herself.

I had always vaguely known that Freud, though respected, was mostly outdated. I distinctly remember learning about Freudian female desire in a class and being irrationally mad. I was furious at Freud. I remember thinking, "He can't tell me what I want or how I feel! He's dead!" Freud may be dead, but his ideas persist. Thankfully there have been many revisions to his ideas by later psychologists, philosophers, and cultural theorists. Unfortunately, even as they are being revised in academia, they persist in our larger cultural psyche. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published The Anti-Oedipus almost 40 years ago, and I know it's not the easiest read (I know I've mostly just looked at the cover) but one would hope that some ideas would have filtered down to the outermost edges of the rest of culture. I haven't seen any.

I am interested in vagina dentata primarily for its absurdity. I have a vagina and I know there aren't any teeth in it, and it is bizarre to me anyone would have thought so. It is probable that the myriad stories were never supposed to be taken as fact and believed, like most fairy tales. Bruce Jackson discusses in "Vagina Dentata and Cystic Teratoma" the possibility that the presence of dermoid cysts may account for the persistence of the vagina dentata myth (342). Dermoid cysts are a type of cystic teratoma that develop within the ovaries and therefore can contain any tissue of the human body within them, most frequently hair and teeth: "Complex organs such as eyes are quite rare, and most of the other tissue forms would not be recognized by anyone but a trained observer, but two of the most common tissue growths--hair and teeth--would be recognized by anyone" (Jackson 342). Any carving up of the female body with a dermoid cyst, intentional or unintentional, would yield something mysterious and gross. Origins of the myth itself are still shrouded in mystery, and are probably due to anxiety about sexual difference, which may be understandable. I suppose one should avoid putting delicate things into mysterious holes.

I chose to transform vagina dentata from an oppressive symbol to a dubious yet positive symbol. I am fascinated with the myth, drawn to it, so I cannot condemn it completely but I can rewrite it to an extent. This is a protective symbol of troubled yet freeing agency. We are not Freudian girls, passively and sullenly wanting dick. We can fight back against phallocentrism with the part that marks us as different. We do not lack; we bite.

The teeth embroidery along the seams of the dresses act as a protective symbol. I am re-seeing clothing as a site. The seams themselves are particularly a site of vulnerability. They are paradoxically the strongest part of a garment and also the easiest place to pick a garment apart. Because they can be so vulnerable, placing the embroidery over the seams becomes an act of care, a protective act in the same way that many ancient (and modern) peoples embroider on the collar and cuffs as an act of protective magic. Elizabeth Wayland Barber writes, "note that Slavic red embroideries are generally located at the openings of the clothing-- neckhole, wrists, and shirttail. This decoration was meant to discourage demons from crawling in at the openings since the demons were thought to cause illnesses..." (162). The teeth act as ambiguously aggressive and defensive protective signs, aggressively present yet defensively clenched. They are there, ready to act, but are restrained.

Altering vagina dentata into something completely positive is not quite possible. By embracing such a sign, one also embraces the taxonomy of gender, a thing that implies that there is an essential quality to femininity, that we all desire to bite back. Vagina dentata is also symbolic of self-surveillance, of making sure that you yourself measure up to the societal standards that you cannot see to disagree with. Societal norms aren't just external pressure; we internalize that pressure in order to keep ourselves in line. There are penalties for nonconformity, after all.

Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger are a husband and husband team of performance artists who sew. Their untitled sewing performance (2007-2008) performs their relationship. They spend eight hours sewing each other's clothing together from ankle to neck, and then struggle out of their clothing and leave the garments on the chairs as a remnant. They are close and help each other, but that closeness can be confining. Untitled sewing performance is an ambiguous gesture of care using textiles. The teeth embroidery is exactly that. The teeth's troubled symbolic nature is a measure of protection for the wearer of the dress, but is also confining the wearer to that dress and to the act of self-surveillance.

Vagina dentata helps us be angry at the world, a very unfeminine feeling, but it also turns us into a very feminine monster.

The night after my grandmother's viewing, she is in my dreams. We are sitting on a stoop, and I am cradling a battered Holga camera. I tell her that in the funeral home, her face had looked all wrong. Her eyes had been too hollow. She had looked too thin, too serious and severe. From certain angles she had looked like wax. She smiles. She sticks out her tongue from the side of her mouth and crosses her eyes; I take a picture. She jokes and makes more faces and I capture her frame by frame. Then it is the end. She leans forward and whispers in my ear, "I want you to have my soul." She leaves. I walk away, but I stumble and drop the camera. The back pops off, exposing the film, erasing any image of her. I gather the film to my body, curl around it protectively, hoping to shield the film from the light but it is too late.

Early feminist art of the 1970s often centered around the body, because it is the source of sexual difference. Body art was often performative in nature, such as Carolee Schneeman's Interior Scroll (1975). In her performance piece, Schneeman is covered in gestural paint marks as she slowly draws out a scroll from her vaginal cavity and reads the words on it aloud. The words are bits and pieces of rejection letters, letters from male gallery owners and filmmakers rejecting her and her art fundamentally because Schneeman is female.

In the 1980s there was a reaction to that sort of art. Conceptual artist Mary Kelly said in a 1982 interview, quoted by Amelia Jones,
when the image of a woman is used in a work of art, that is, when her body or person is given as a signifier, it becomes extremely problematic. Most women artists who have presented themselves in some way, visibly, in the work have been unable to find the kind of distancing devices which would cut across the predominant representations of women as object of the look, to question the notion of femininity as pre-given entity" (24).

Here Kelly is saying that not only the image/representation of the female body is problematic due to its easy slide into objectification, but the presence of her body is also problematic. Kelly and other feminist artists were deeply worried about the possibility of objectification, so they moved onto other means to express ideas about the body without signifying the body directly. In her work Interim, part I: Corpus (1984-1985), she uses photos of women's clothing that has been knotted, tied, and contorted in various ways in order to imply the woman's psychological state. Kelly is working from early photographs of "hysterical" women, taken by Freud's mentor J.M. Charcot. Moreover, "the articles of clothing are arranged in 'passionate attitudes' reminiscent of these female hysterics and labeled with Charcot's terminology" (Jones 29).

The interesting thing about sourcing Charcot, is that he was using photography as a way to document and pathologize female emotion. However, his documentation was not as objective and scientific as he would have everyone think. The women who were photographed were asked to perform their different hysteric types, and the photographs themselves frequently make them appear as beatific as saints in the middle of ecstasy.

Kelly's photographs of contorted clothing share the same constructedness as well as the "passionate attitudes" of the hysterics. Since they are articles of clothing, they must be arranged by another hand, Kelly's hand.

The photos are juxtaposed against "text panels with hand-written first person accounts of older women experiencing their bodies in the social realm" (Jones 28-29). For example, one of those narratives is a woman at a college party who catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror and criticizes her appearance because her clothing is out of date, her hairstyle looks too severe, and her hips are too wide. The placement of the text panels next to the photographs of contorted clothing highlights the same sense of constructedness of the female body in the narrative. (The narrative itself is not under question at first, because it is handwritten which implies authenticity, evidence of the intersubjective self and lived experience.) In this particular narrative, the woman's age is signified by her hairstyle and her clothing. The narrative implies that there are two different preconceived images-- older woman, younger woman-- and that this woman fits into the former category because of certain signs. Not only does this woman have these two different standards within her mind, but she knows that everyone else has the same categories and are judging her to see which one she fits.

Kelly specifically chooses not to depict the female body, but Corpus is all about the female body. The text and image "produce a stand-in for the body itself in order to explore the effects of subjectivity as well as the social processes that inform it" (Jones 29). The "distancing devices" Kelly talks about come from Bertolt Brecht (Verfremdungseffekt in German), and they serve to "[prevent] the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer" (Brecht 91). Kelly does not produce representations of the body, because she thinks that they will seduce the viewer. By not having bodies, only oblique references to the body, the viewer remains distant from the subject matter, and, to her, able to be critically engaged.

Something about this distancing approach has never struck me as quite complete. If one's subject is bodies, then I feel that one should engage the body of the viewer. Kelly does not engage the viewer's body, just the viewer visually and mentally. Society as it is now privileges vision as the ultimate source of information ("seeing is believing") but vision is disembodied, disinterested (1). The body, and therefore the intersubjective self that is a part of that body, has more ways to gain information than the sense of sight.

I prefer a theory of theater that is not exactly incompatible to Brecht, but focuses more on an embodied distance than an intellectual one. Antonin Artaud talks about his Theater of Cruelty:
"The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid" (66).

What Artaud means by cruelty is not necessarily triggering pain (though he leaves that possibility open) but a ferocious, tangible determination to tear apart the false reality of theater. Brecht and Artaud both acknowledge theater's artifice and they both do not want the audience to passively be seduced by a false reality. Brecht makes up for potential seduction by forcing the viewer out of the role of spectator and into the role of engaged critical thinker. Artaud, on the other hand, wants to consume the viewer with the physical language of theater, indifferent to actual language and favoring mise-en-scene and theater's unique language, "halfway between thought and gesture" (Artaud 41).

Central to my work is the presence of the body, collapsing any Verfremdungseffekt that could be present, having the audience inexorably encounter the false reality of the taxonomy of gender. However, it isn't the mere presence of the body that makes the collapse feasible. It's not just mere bodily occupation of space, but presence of a person's intersubjectivity which is grounded within the body itself. I need the body for its subjective self, which comes with its active presence--I see it as the only way to remain a subject and not become an object. Objects remain objects; they were never subjective and cannot become intersubjective people. If a woman is remaining herself and not becoming someone or something else, she will remain a subject and resist objectification. That is why I am present in my work, and why I have asked my friends to be a part of the work as well: the more of us resisting objectification, the better.

I contrast the active intersubjective presence of our bodies in real space with forms of representation: drawing/image, the embroidery; and chemical/mimetic, photography. These are objects and can only remain objects. They reference the body and are about the body, but do not equal the body. They are not intersubjective. They are expressive, and they communicate, but they remain objects. They have ghostly residue of my hand, my gesture, my aesthetic, and my point of view but they do not contain me.

I chose to embroider, a type of drawing, rather than draw with more traditional art medium. Embroidery is loaded in more than one way. Embroidery has overt connotations of handicrafts and "women's work," both of which are not traditional high art media. Embroidery is a feminine craft, and I wanted to use a gendered medium to speak about gender. In addition, since this piece is about active presence in physical space, I wanted to use a medium that would be present and refuse to be invisible. Textiles always beg to be touched, refusing disinterestedness and embodying the viewer. Invisible media would be a medium that is accustomed to being in a gallery space for visual engagement: painting, drawing, photography, etc.

I also chose to utilize photography though it could be treated as an invisible medium. My photographs are present because they are printed on fabric, becoming textiles. Photography is objective, documentary, the fact of time and light captured on film in chemicals. My photographs do not read as documents because the photographs are abstract, not mimetic. The photographic process is outlined for the viewer. Each photo contains marks of its creation process within the brushstrokes of the emulsion and the organic shapes that are the play of chemicals across the exposed emulsion's surface. Each photo was based on a negative of teeth, and each photo contains the story of its own making, even if I cannot explain it to you.

The textiles, mark making, and chemicals that I used are methods that contrast with the active presence of an intersubjective body because they are present in a different way. They are present because they are objects occupying space (the basis of all presence) but also because they engage with the viewer physically, embodying the viewer as they are interested in touching the art.

A girl is staring at me unflinchingly. Her eyes are wide. I don't know why she is looking at me. She slowly begins to smile, her lips parting like a curtain on a stage. Her teeth are too large. Her grin is a grimace. Her smile is a snarl. Her two front teeth are larger than the rest and there are two deep grooves down the center of each. Each crevice is filled with half chewed food and plaque. How embarrassing, I think, and the thought jolts me awake from the dream.

Ideally, one should be questioning the taxonomy of gender, why certain genders are expected to be certain ways. Strict gender categories imply that there are essential qualities to gender, and that these essential qualities are tied to the corporeal body. Men are expected to be assertive and active, and those qualities stem from the fact that they have a penis. Women are expected to be reserved and passive, and those qualities stem from the fact that they have a vagina, a lack of penis. In view of the fact that this system favors men over women, we can definitely call it a patriarchy. Since patriarchy is invested in a strict gender binary, patriarchy is about creating and enforcing boundaries.

Boundaries aren't limited to gender. A boundary that functions beneficially for persons in power in the patriarchal system is the boundary between self and other. The self/other boundary serves two purposes: to keep the self in and to keep others out, which produces coherent sense of self. However, a coherent self is a false reality. That is, we can only ever be ourselves, but the self is never just one thin in a single state. The self experiences changes as simple as acting differently around another person (e.g. one's mother versus one's friends) and as far-reaching as gaining life experience and aging over a long period of time.
Patriarchy, because it is invested in boundaries and a cohered self, pathologizes change. Illness is seen as an anomaly, a period of time when one is not oneself, which can easily lead to any lapse in the cohered self being called an illness. Moreover, please excuse a brief digression, the cohered self, in terms of gender and sexuality, is male and heterosexual. The categorical aspects of gender support heterosexuality (men desiring women), which is what lead to homosexuality being categorized as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1974.
Within my work I am playing with boundaries. Sometimes I create my own boundaries, such as with the photo-curtain installation. The viewer must navigate that boundary with their bodies, physically interacting with the space. The double curtain also acts as a container, creating a corridor and an interior room. The interior room, which does not have photographs, acts as a place of stillness and that is where I perform.

I spoke about Brecht and Artaud previously, and about how I wanted to collapse distances with the presence of an intersubjective body. I also want to collapse the traditional boundary between performer and spectator, which is why my little curtain room is not a stage and easily accessible. Performer and spectator can be construed as gendered roles, like Nietzsche writes here, as quoted by Amelia Jones, "In the theater, one becomes people, herd, female, pharisee, voting cattle, patron, idiot" (108). Therefore, a collapse of those gendered roles helps tear apart the false reality of theater.

Another boundary I play with is the boundary of clothing. Clothing is an actual obstruction between self and other, but I am also using them as a site to play with the boundary between public and private. By embroidering the dresses with teeth, I externalize things that were formerly internal. I use the seams of the dresses a surrogate labia, as a location to place vaginas (an internal organ) externally. However, the teeth also represent the internal emotions of the monstrous female, so I am also giving external, metaphorical form to internal thoughts and feelings.

I am also playing with the boundary of essential femininity by using more than one dress. Each dress is a found object with its own language. Using more than one questions essential or pre-given qualities to femininity. Not every dress is sexy. Not every woman is sexy or wants to be sexy. The dresses interrogate essential femininity but to not transcend it, because they remain dresses, feminine articles of clothing.
Elsa Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer who was also closely aligned with the Surrealists. She utilized Surrealist visual language, the juxtaposition of unusual things, in conjunction with vernacular language of the fashion of her day, the 1930s and 1940s. Since Schiaparelli is not changing the overall silhouette of the fashions of her day but mostly decorating on top of them, it is more like she is commenting on fashion itself, how it is worn, and the body beneath.
She is known for her elegant evening suits, which often used unusual closures on the front, such as small silver tambourines, plastic insects, or dome-shaped buttons with real flowers suspended in the plastic. The buttons frequently carried an unusual theme started in embroidery, beadwork, or another decorative media, to its conclusion.

As with the work of the other Surrealists, Schiaparelli's work is often riddled with erotic undertones. She designed an evening gown in 1938 that was all black but utilized trapunto quilting in order to create padded "bones" that correlated with the wearer's body beneath. She emphasized three pairs of ribs, a spine, the elbows and wrists, and hip bones. By highlighting the wearer's body, she is bringing to mind the nude beneath the dress. However, she does so darkly: by highlighting bones, she is also bringing to mind the skeleton beneath the nude. Here Schiaparelli is examining essential femininity by connecting it back to the body. The only thing all women have in common are their bodies, but even then each one is different. The most comment element to each body is, perhaps, only the skeleton that gives it structure.
I am doing similar things to Schiaparelli: I am appropriating existing garments; I am adding unexpected decoration, embroidery of teeth; I am making the viewer think about the body beneath the clothing, playing with the boundary of clothing.

The language of clothing signifies things about the wearer. Sometimes the signifiers of clothing do not signify the wearer but continue to signify, and that is when clothing becomes costume. The clothing my participants and I are wearing can lend themselves to costume, but do not fully become costume because they are not signifying something we are not. My participants and I do not become anything else and remain our incoherent selves. The clothing does not act as a costume in order to transform us into different selves, because they are signifying that we are female and that we are complicated and have a problematic relationship to essential femininity.

We are remaining our full intersubjective selves for the duration of the performance acts. We are performing, but in the sense that gender is always a performance. We have been playing these roles for as long as we can remember. We are well-rehearsed.

Each of is us reiterating our gender through our clothing and performance, but there are so many things in the piece as a whole that are reiterated and repeated. The photograph is repeated. The act of the stitch is repeated in the embroidery and the curtain. The form of the curtain is doubled. The sign of dress is repeated. The motif of teeth is repeated.

Freud calls the uncanny (Das Unheimliche) an "involuntary repetition" (62). The viewer experiences each repeated action involuntarily since they are not the creator of the work. The more something is repeated, the simultaneously more familiar and unfamiliar it can become. Unfamiliarity loses us easily. We get lost in repeated shapes and signs. Everything in the body is repeated. Everything here is repeated. The symbol of teeth is repeated; the act of the stitch is repeated; the shape of the photograph is repeated; gender as performance is repeated. Unfamiliarity loses us easily. We get lost within repeated shapes and signs-- these are teeth. Or they could be. They could be the size of the tips of our fingers. But they are white, and white in the body is bone. Teeth are bone. Teeth are that size. Or they could be. The scale is a little off. Some of them loom larger. Some of them are too small. Some of them are too untidy. They seem too pointed. But most of our teeth are pointed. How often do we look at our teeth? How often do we look at our teeth and not see a smile?

I am short and my boyfriend is tall, so resting my forehead against his chest is easy. I hang onto him as tightly as I can as he gently puts his arms around my shoulders and then squeezes me resolutely. I am crying. I can feel the overwhelming stress pushing its way out of my chest, closing my throat, and streaming out of the corners of my eyes. I do my best to avoid getting his shirt wet, but it happens. He rests his chin on the top of my head, and I am completely enclosed. The pressure all around me eases the pressure in my chest.

As I embroider, I lean closer and closer to the fabric on my lap. My right side contracts more than my left, and I get a lopsided ache beneath my right shoulder blade. It's been hours, and at this point my fingers are beginning to ache. On my right hand it's the thumb, index, and middle fingers from holding a dull needle and pushing it through layers of poly-taffeta over and over. On my left hand, my knuckles are stuff from holding the fabric too firmly. I've been resting my crossed ankles on a table, and my knees ache from being locked. The back of my neck aches from craning forward. I always try to start embroidering upright, sitting comfortably and holding my work on my lap, but the work and my body creep closer and closer over time. I don't need glasses; the closeness is only from concentration. I discovered recently that my name saint, Saint Clare of Assisi, is patron of embroiderers and of good eyesight. I was raised Catholic, and even though I no longer identify with religion generally, Catholicism is hard to shake off. I feel lucky to be named after a saint who wasn't an asshole.
Working on this project has made me aware of many of my physical habits. When I hunch over, it's always slightly to the right so my back always aches asymmetrically, in an inconvenient spot that is hard to stretch out. I squint and lean in closely. Sometimes I get headaches, but I still don't think I need glasses. I get headaches often enough from concentrating for long periods of time.

With this project, I wanted to investigate larger societal norms about the female body and the self, but it also became an investigation into my own body and self. I learned a lot about my physical habits and my wok habits. I learned how much I could push myself physically, emotionally, and mentally before I began to feel burned out. I began to feel burned out on this project early on, but I managed to revitalize it for me because I knew that I would not do a good job on a project I did not like. I am satisfied with dentata dresses, but with all work with which I am satisfied I want to do it over again because now I know how the process could have been easier.
Throughout some of the different aspects of this project, and in my earlier work which has little to do with this show, I felt like there was still some distance between me, my work, and the world, even in some of the performance pieces where I was literally there. I wanted to be within my art and invested in it and within it fully. I wanted to collapse this distance I felt and make work from within culture and being within culture. I am not a creature from beyond, studying different social mores with scientific distance. I am here, making art, and I wanted to deal with issues that effect me. That's one of the reasons I perform in the gallery and believe strongly in the presence of the subjective/intersubjective body.

Ultimately, I am caught. I am a product of our culture. Feminism has been good to me, has allowed me to question my surroundings. I wish to remain a subjective agent. I want to be in control of myself, and do not want to succumb to external pressure. But I worry. The pressure is not just external, it is internal. I know that when I do not shave my legs, the other girls in my dance class will see them and look at each other knowingly. When a male friend jokes about women in the kitchen, I nervously laugh along and joke about being barefoot and pregnant. I try not to be complicit. I try not to call anyone a slut or a bitch. I try not to judge when I witness another woman cry, or a man cry. I try not to judge myself when I cry. All I can do are small things that effect my immediate surroundings. I can only ever be myself.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958. Print.

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994. Print.

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Print.

Gingerich, Willard. "Three Nahuatl Hymns on the Mother Archetype: An Interpretive Commentary." Mexican Studies / Estudios: 4.2 (Summer, 1988): 191-244. JSTOR. Web. 29 April 2010.

Grosz, Elizabeth. "Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death." Sexy bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. New York: Routledge, 1995. 278-299. Google Scholar. 29 April 2010.

Ho, Ting-jui. "East Asian Themes in Folktales of the Formosan Aborigines." Asian Folklore Studies: 23.2 (1964): 35-47. JSTOR. Web. 29 April 2010.

Jackson, Bruce. "Vagina Dentata and Cystic Teratoma." The Journal of American Folklore: 84.333: (Jul. - Sep., 1971). 341-342. JSTOR. 29 April 2010.

Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Print.

(1) I use "disinterested" specifically, referring to Immanuel Kant's ideas about aesthetic judgment that informed formalist, Greenbergian Modernism. In Kantian aesthetic judgment, one remains disinterested in order to make a judgment that is more universal, rather than one that is mere personal taste. Harold Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters" embodied the Abstract Expressionists, but embodiment means interestedness. Bodies are interested in other bodies. In Greenbergian Modernism, the artist remains disembodied, and thus one can remain disinterested in the work in order to judge it formally.

Clare Nicholls ST. MARY'S PROJECT, 2010
	Artist Statement Bibliography Image Gallery Home Close Portfolio (and return to smp index)	Table of Contents I. Teeth II. Presence III. Performance-Installation IV. Process Works Cited I am having a dream where all the teeth fall out of my mouth like a waterfall. I pick them off the ground and try to put them back in my gums, but another tooth pushes it out of the way. Thousands of teeth cascade out of my mouth and onto the ground. I scratch at the ground, gathering armfuls of teeth, but they are damp and covered in dirt. I. Teeth (back to top) Vagina dentata, the toothed vagina, is a myth with variants widespread through many cultures, including but not limited to: North and South Americas, Polynesia, India, Korea, Japan, Greece, Egypt, and Africa (Ho 44; Gingerich 220). There are disagreements about its meaning and symbolism. It is largely read as a symbol of male castration anxiety, for obvious reasons. Many attribute the vagina dentata idea to Sigmund Freud, as he was very interested in castration anxiety, but he never wrote about the myth. Freud more or less believed the opposite; the vagina was not the castrator but an example of a castrated body (the female body in Freud's conceptualization, of course, remains passive). Elizabeth Grosz writes, "The fantasy of the vagina dentata, of the non-human status of woman as android, vampire or animal, the identification of female sexuality as voracious, insatiable, enigmatic, invisible and unknowable, cold, calculating, instrumental, castrator/decapitator of the male, dissimulatress or fake, predatory, engulfing mother, preying on male weakness, are all consequences of the ways in which male orgasm has functioned as the measure and representative of all sexualities and all modes of erotic encounter" (293). Freud's theories certainly conceptualized female sexuality in terms of male sexuality. The female lacks a penis and therefore is envious and wants one. She has little to no sexual desire herself. I had always vaguely known that Freud, though respected, was mostly outdated. I distinctly remember learning about Freudian female desire in a class and being irrationally mad. I was furious at Freud. I remember thinking, "He can't tell me what I want or how I feel! He's dead!" Freud may be dead, but his ideas persist. Thankfully there have been many revisions to his ideas by later psychologists, philosophers, and cultural theorists. Unfortunately, even as they are being revised in academia, they persist in our larger cultural psyche. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published The Anti-Oedipus almost 40 years ago, and I know it's not the easiest read (I know I've mostly just looked at the cover) but one would hope that some ideas would have filtered down to the outermost edges of the rest of culture. I haven't seen any. Let's move on from Freud, here and elsewhere. I am interested in vagina dentata primarily for its absurdity. I have a vagina and I know there aren't any teeth in it, and it is bizarre to me anyone would have thought so. It is probable that the myriad stories were never supposed to be taken as fact and believed, like most fairy tales. Bruce Jackson discusses in "Vagina Dentata and Cystic Teratoma" the possibility that the presence of dermoid cysts may account for the persistence of the vagina dentata myth (342). Dermoid cysts are a type of cystic teratoma that develop within the ovaries and therefore can contain any tissue of the human body within them, most frequently hair and teeth: "Complex organs such as eyes are quite rare, and most of the other tissue forms would not be recognized by anyone but a trained observer, but two of the most common tissue growths--hair and teeth--would be recognized by anyone" (Jackson 342). Any carving up of the female body with a dermoid cyst, intentional or unintentional, would yield something mysterious and gross. Origins of the myth itself are still shrouded in mystery, and are probably due to anxiety about sexual difference, which may be understandable. I suppose one should avoid putting delicate things into mysterious holes. I chose to transform vagina dentata from an oppressive symbol to a dubious yet positive symbol. I am fascinated with the myth, drawn to it, so I cannot condemn it completely but I can rewrite it to an extent. This is a protective symbol of troubled yet freeing agency. We are not Freudian girls, passively and sullenly wanting dick. We can fight back against phallocentrism with the part that marks us as different. We do not lack; we bite. The teeth embroidery along the seams of the dresses act as a protective symbol. I am re-seeing clothing as a site. The seams themselves are particularly a site of vulnerability. They are paradoxically the strongest part of a garment and also the easiest place to pick a garment apart. Because they can be so vulnerable, placing the embroidery over the seams becomes an act of care, a protective act in the same way that many ancient (and modern) peoples embroider on the collar and cuffs as an act of protective magic. Elizabeth Wayland Barber writes, "note that Slavic red embroideries are generally located at the openings of the clothing-- neckhole, wrists, and shirttail. This decoration was meant to discourage demons from crawling in at the openings since the demons were thought to cause illnesses..." (162). The teeth act as ambiguously aggressive and defensive protective signs, aggressively present yet defensively clenched. They are there, ready to act, but are restrained. Altering vagina dentata into something completely positive is not quite possible. By embracing such a sign, one also embraces the taxonomy of gender, a thing that implies that there is an essential quality to femininity, that we all desire to bite back. Vagina dentata is also symbolic of self-surveillance, of making sure that you yourself measure up to the societal standards that you cannot see to disagree with. Societal norms aren't just external pressure; we internalize that pressure in order to keep ourselves in line. There are penalties for nonconformity, after all. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger are a husband and husband team of performance artists who sew. Their untitled sewing performance (2007-2008) performs their relationship. They spend eight hours sewing each other's clothing together from ankle to neck, and then struggle out of their clothing and leave the garments on the chairs as a remnant. They are close and help each other, but that closeness can be confining. Untitled sewing performance is an ambiguous gesture of care using textiles. The teeth embroidery is exactly that. The teeth's troubled symbolic nature is a measure of protection for the wearer of the dress, but is also confining the wearer to that dress and to the act of self-surveillance. Vagina dentata helps us be angry at the world, a very unfeminine feeling, but it also turns us into a very feminine monster. * The night after my grandmother's viewing, she is in my dreams. We are sitting on a stoop, and I am cradling a battered Holga camera. I tell her that in the funeral home, her face had looked all wrong. Her eyes had been too hollow. She had looked too thin, too serious and severe. From certain angles she had looked like wax. She smiles. She sticks out her tongue from the side of her mouth and crosses her eyes; I take a picture. She jokes and makes more faces and I capture her frame by frame. Then it is the end. She leans forward and whispers in my ear, "I want you to have my soul." She leaves. I walk away, but I stumble and drop the camera. The back pops off, exposing the film, erasing any image of her. I gather the film to my body, curl around it protectively, hoping to shield the film from the light but it is too late. II. Presence** (back to top) Early feminist art of the 1970s often centered around the body, because it is the source of sexual difference. Body art was often performative in nature, such as Carolee Schneeman's Interior Scroll (1975). In her performance piece, Schneeman is covered in gestural paint marks as she slowly draws out a scroll from her vaginal cavity and reads the words on it aloud. The words are bits and pieces of rejection letters, letters from male gallery owners and filmmakers rejecting her and her art fundamentally because Schneeman is female. In the 1980s there was a reaction to that sort of art. Conceptual artist Mary Kelly said in a 1982 interview, quoted by Amelia Jones, when the image of a woman is used in a work of art, that is, when her body or person is given as a signifier, it becomes extremely problematic. Most women artists who have presented themselves in some way, visibly, in the work have been unable to find the kind of distancing devices which would cut across the predominant representations of women as object of the look, to question the notion of femininity as pre-given entity" (24). Here Kelly is saying that not only the image/representation of the female body is problematic due to its easy slide into objectification, but the presence of her body is also problematic. Kelly and other feminist artists were deeply worried about the possibility of objectification, so they moved onto other means to express ideas about the body without signifying the body directly. In her work Interim, part I: Corpus (1984-1985), she uses photos of women's clothing that has been knotted, tied, and contorted in various ways in order to imply the woman's psychological state. Kelly is working from early photographs of "hysterical" women, taken by Freud's mentor J.M. Charcot. Moreover, "the articles of clothing are arranged in 'passionate attitudes' reminiscent of these female hysterics and labeled with Charcot's terminology" (Jones 29). The interesting thing about sourcing Charcot, is that he was using photography as a way to document and pathologize female emotion. However, his documentation was not as objective and scientific as he would have everyone think. The women who were photographed were asked to perform their different hysteric types, and the photographs themselves frequently make them appear as beatific as saints in the middle of ecstasy. Kelly's photographs of contorted clothing share the same constructedness as well as the "passionate attitudes" of the hysterics. Since they are articles of clothing, they must be arranged by another hand, Kelly's hand. The photos are juxtaposed against "text panels with hand-written first person accounts of older women experiencing their bodies in the social realm" (Jones 28-29). For example, one of those narratives is a woman at a college party who catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror and criticizes her appearance because her clothing is out of date, her hairstyle looks too severe, and her hips are too wide. The placement of the text panels next to the photographs of contorted clothing highlights the same sense of constructedness of the female body in the narrative. (The narrative itself is not under question at first, because it is handwritten which implies authenticity, evidence of the intersubjective self and lived experience.) In this particular narrative, the woman's age is signified by her hairstyle and her clothing. The narrative implies that there are two different preconceived images-- older woman, younger woman-- and that this woman fits into the former category because of certain signs. Not only does this woman have these two different standards within her mind, but she knows that everyone else has the same categories and are judging her to see which one she fits. Kelly specifically chooses not to depict the female body, but Corpus is all about the female body. The text and image "produce a stand-in for the body itself in order to explore the effects of subjectivity as well as the social processes that inform it" (Jones 29). The "distancing devices" Kelly talks about come from Bertolt Brecht (Verfremdungseffekt in German), and they serve to "[prevent] the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer" (Brecht 91). Kelly does not produce representations of the body, because she thinks that they will seduce the viewer. By not having bodies, only oblique references to the body, the viewer remains distant from the subject matter, and, to her, able to be critically engaged. Something about this distancing approach has never struck me as quite complete. If one's subject is bodies, then I feel that one should engage the body of the viewer. Kelly does not engage the viewer's body, just the viewer visually and mentally. Society as it is now privileges vision as the ultimate source of information ("seeing is believing") but vision is disembodied, disinterested (1). The body, and therefore the intersubjective self that is a part of that body, has more ways to gain information than the sense of sight. I prefer a theory of theater that is not exactly incompatible to Brecht, but focuses more on an embodied distance than an intellectual one. Antonin Artaud talks about his Theater of Cruelty: "The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid" (66). What Artaud means by cruelty is not necessarily triggering pain (though he leaves that possibility open) but a ferocious, tangible determination to tear apart the false reality of theater. Brecht and Artaud both acknowledge theater's artifice and they both do not want the audience to passively be seduced by a false reality. Brecht makes up for potential seduction by forcing the viewer out of the role of spectator and into the role of engaged critical thinker. Artaud, on the other hand, wants to consume the viewer with the physical language of theater, indifferent to actual language and favoring mise-en-scene and theater's unique language, "halfway between thought and gesture" (Artaud 41). Central to my work is the presence of the body, collapsing any Verfremdungseffekt that could be present, having the audience inexorably encounter the false reality of the taxonomy of gender. However, it isn't the mere presence of the body that makes the collapse feasible. It's not just mere bodily occupation of space, but presence of a person's intersubjectivity which is grounded within the body itself. I need the body for its subjective self, which comes with its active presence--I see it as the only way to remain a subject and not become an object. Objects remain objects; they were never subjective and cannot become intersubjective people. If a woman is remaining herself and not becoming someone or something else, she will remain a subject and resist objectification. That is why I am present in my work, and why I have asked my friends to be a part of the work as well: the more of us resisting objectification, the better. I contrast the active intersubjective presence of our bodies in real space with forms of representation: drawing/image, the embroidery; and chemical/mimetic, photography. These are objects and can only remain objects. They reference the body and are about the body, but do not equal the body. They are not intersubjective. They are expressive, and they communicate, but they remain objects. They have ghostly residue of my hand, my gesture, my aesthetic, and my point of view but they do not contain me. I chose to embroider, a type of drawing, rather than draw with more traditional art medium. Embroidery is loaded in more than one way. Embroidery has overt connotations of handicrafts and "women's work," both of which are not traditional high art media. Embroidery is a feminine craft, and I wanted to use a gendered medium to speak about gender. In addition, since this piece is about active presence in physical space, I wanted to use a medium that would be present and refuse to be invisible. Textiles always beg to be touched, refusing disinterestedness and embodying the viewer. Invisible media would be a medium that is accustomed to being in a gallery space for visual engagement: painting, drawing, photography, etc. I also chose to utilize photography though it could be treated as an invisible medium. My photographs are present because they are printed on fabric, becoming textiles. Photography is objective, documentary, the fact of time and light captured on film in chemicals. My photographs do not read as documents because the photographs are abstract, not mimetic. The photographic process is outlined for the viewer. Each photo contains marks of its creation process within the brushstrokes of the emulsion and the organic shapes that are the play of chemicals across the exposed emulsion's surface. Each photo was based on a negative of teeth, and each photo contains the story of its own making, even if I cannot explain it to you. The textiles, mark making, and chemicals that I used are methods that contrast with the active presence of an intersubjective body because they are present in a different way. They are present because they are objects occupying space (the basis of all presence) but also because they engage with the viewer physically, embodying the viewer as they are interested in touching the art. * A girl is staring at me unflinchingly. Her eyes are wide. I don't know why she is looking at me. She slowly begins to smile, her lips parting like a curtain on a stage. Her teeth are too large. Her grin is a grimace. Her smile is a snarl. Her two front teeth are larger than the rest and there are two deep grooves down the center of each. Each crevice is filled with half chewed food and plaque. How embarrassing, I think, and the thought jolts me awake from the dream. III. Performance-Installation** (back to top) Ideally, one should be questioning the taxonomy of gender, why certain genders are expected to be certain ways. Strict gender categories imply that there are essential qualities to gender, and that these essential qualities are tied to the corporeal body. Men are expected to be assertive and active, and those qualities stem from the fact that they have a penis. Women are expected to be reserved and passive, and those qualities stem from the fact that they have a vagina, a lack of penis. In view of the fact that this system favors men over women, we can definitely call it a patriarchy. Since patriarchy is invested in a strict gender binary, patriarchy is about creating and enforcing boundaries. Boundaries aren't limited to gender. A boundary that functions beneficially for persons in power in the patriarchal system is the boundary between self and other. The self/other boundary serves two purposes: to keep the self in and to keep others out, which produces coherent sense of self. However, a coherent self is a false reality. That is, we can only ever be ourselves, but the self is never just one thin in a single state. The self experiences changes as simple as acting differently around another person (e.g. one's mother versus one's friends) and as far-reaching as gaining life experience and aging over a long period of time. Patriarchy, because it is invested in boundaries and a cohered self, pathologizes change. Illness is seen as an anomaly, a period of time when one is not oneself, which can easily lead to any lapse in the cohered self being called an illness. Moreover, please excuse a brief digression, the cohered self, in terms of gender and sexuality, is male and heterosexual. The categorical aspects of gender support heterosexuality (men desiring women), which is what lead to homosexuality being categorized as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1974. Within my work I am playing with boundaries. Sometimes I create my own boundaries, such as with the photo-curtain installation. The viewer must navigate that boundary with their bodies, physically interacting with the space. The double curtain also acts as a container, creating a corridor and an interior room. The interior room, which does not have photographs, acts as a place of stillness and that is where I perform. I spoke about Brecht and Artaud previously, and about how I wanted to collapse distances with the presence of an intersubjective body. I also want to collapse the traditional boundary between performer and spectator, which is why my little curtain room is not a stage and easily accessible. Performer and spectator can be construed as gendered roles, like Nietzsche writes here, as quoted by Amelia Jones, "In the theater, one becomes people, herd, female, pharisee, voting cattle, patron, idiot" (108). Therefore, a collapse of those gendered roles helps tear apart the false reality of theater. Another boundary I play with is the boundary of clothing. Clothing is an actual obstruction between self and other, but I am also using them as a site to play with the boundary between public and private. By embroidering the dresses with teeth, I externalize things that were formerly internal. I use the seams of the dresses a surrogate labia, as a location to place vaginas (an internal organ) externally. However, the teeth also represent the internal emotions of the monstrous female, so I am also giving external, metaphorical form to internal thoughts and feelings. I am also playing with the boundary of essential femininity by using more than one dress. Each dress is a found object with its own language. Using more than one questions essential or pre-given qualities to femininity. Not every dress is sexy. Not every woman is sexy or wants to be sexy. The dresses interrogate essential femininity but to not transcend it, because they remain dresses, feminine articles of clothing. Elsa Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer who was also closely aligned with the Surrealists. She utilized Surrealist visual language, the juxtaposition of unusual things, in conjunction with vernacular language of the fashion of her day, the 1930s and 1940s. Since Schiaparelli is not changing the overall silhouette of the fashions of her day but mostly decorating on top of them, it is more like she is commenting on fashion itself, how it is worn, and the body beneath. She is known for her elegant evening suits, which often used unusual closures on the front, such as small silver tambourines, plastic insects, or dome-shaped buttons with real flowers suspended in the plastic. The buttons frequently carried an unusual theme started in embroidery, beadwork, or another decorative media, to its conclusion. As with the work of the other Surrealists, Schiaparelli's work is often riddled with erotic undertones. She designed an evening gown in 1938 that was all black but utilized trapunto quilting in order to create padded "bones" that correlated with the wearer's body beneath. She emphasized three pairs of ribs, a spine, the elbows and wrists, and hip bones. By highlighting the wearer's body, she is bringing to mind the nude beneath the dress. However, she does so darkly: by highlighting bones, she is also bringing to mind the skeleton beneath the nude. Here Schiaparelli is examining essential femininity by connecting it back to the body. The only thing all women have in common are their bodies, but even then each one is different. The most comment element to each body is, perhaps, only the skeleton that gives it structure. I am doing similar things to Schiaparelli: I am appropriating existing garments; I am adding unexpected decoration, embroidery of teeth; I am making the viewer think about the body beneath the clothing, playing with the boundary of clothing. The language of clothing signifies things about the wearer. Sometimes the signifiers of clothing do not signify the wearer but continue to signify, and that is when clothing becomes costume. The clothing my participants and I are wearing can lend themselves to costume, but do not fully become costume because they are not signifying something we are not. My participants and I do not become anything else and remain our incoherent selves. The clothing does not act as a costume in order to transform us into different selves, because they are signifying that we are female and that we are complicated and have a problematic relationship to essential femininity. We are remaining our full intersubjective selves for the duration of the performance acts. We are performing, but in the sense that gender is always a performance. We have been playing these roles for as long as we can remember. We are well-rehearsed. Each of is us reiterating our gender through our clothing and performance, but there are so many things in the piece as a whole that are reiterated and repeated. The photograph is repeated. The act of the stitch is repeated in the embroidery and the curtain. The form of the curtain is doubled. The sign of dress is repeated. The motif of teeth is repeated. Freud calls the uncanny (Das Unheimliche) an "involuntary repetition" (62). The viewer experiences each repeated action involuntarily since they are not the creator of the work. The more something is repeated, the simultaneously more familiar and unfamiliar it can become. Unfamiliarity loses us easily. We get lost in repeated shapes and signs. Everything in the body is repeated. Everything here is repeated. The symbol of teeth is repeated; the act of the stitch is repeated; the shape of the photograph is repeated; gender as performance is repeated. Unfamiliarity loses us easily. We get lost within repeated shapes and signs-- these are teeth. Or they could be. They could be the size of the tips of our fingers. But they are white, and white in the body is bone. Teeth are bone. Teeth are that size. Or they could be. The scale is a little off. Some of them loom larger. Some of them are too small. Some of them are too untidy. They seem too pointed. But most of our teeth are pointed. How often do we look at our teeth? How often do we look at our teeth and not see a smile? * I am short and my boyfriend is tall, so resting my forehead against his chest is easy. I hang onto him as tightly as I can as he gently puts his arms around my shoulders and then squeezes me resolutely. I am crying. I can feel the overwhelming stress pushing its way out of my chest, closing my throat, and streaming out of the corners of my eyes. I do my best to avoid getting his shirt wet, but it happens. He rests his chin on the top of my head, and I am completely enclosed. The pressure all around me eases the pressure in my chest. IV. Process** (back to top) As I embroider, I lean closer and closer to the fabric on my lap. My right side contracts more than my left, and I get a lopsided ache beneath my right shoulder blade. It's been hours, and at this point my fingers are beginning to ache. On my right hand it's the thumb, index, and middle fingers from holding a dull needle and pushing it through layers of poly-taffeta over and over. On my left hand, my knuckles are stuff from holding the fabric too firmly. I've been resting my crossed ankles on a table, and my knees ache from being locked. The back of my neck aches from craning forward. I always try to start embroidering upright, sitting comfortably and holding my work on my lap, but the work and my body creep closer and closer over time. I don't need glasses; the closeness is only from concentration. I discovered recently that my name saint, Saint Clare of Assisi, is patron of embroiderers and of good eyesight. I was raised Catholic, and even though I no longer identify with religion generally, Catholicism is hard to shake off. I feel lucky to be named after a saint who wasn't an asshole. Working on this project has made me aware of many of my physical habits. When I hunch over, it's always slightly to the right so my back always aches asymmetrically, in an inconvenient spot that is hard to stretch out. I squint and lean in closely. Sometimes I get headaches, but I still don't think I need glasses. I get headaches often enough from concentrating for long periods of time. With this project, I wanted to investigate larger societal norms about the female body and the self, but it also became an investigation into my own body and self. I learned a lot about my physical habits and my wok habits. I learned how much I could push myself physically, emotionally, and mentally before I began to feel burned out. I began to feel burned out on this project early on, but I managed to revitalize it for me because I knew that I would not do a good job on a project I did not like. I am satisfied with dentata dresses, but with all work with which I am satisfied I want to do it over again because now I know how the process could have been easier. Throughout some of the different aspects of this project, and in my earlier work which has little to do with this show, I felt like there was still some distance between me, my work, and the world, even in some of the performance pieces where I was literally there. I wanted to be within my art and invested in it and within it fully. I wanted to collapse this distance I felt and make work from within culture and being within culture. I am not a creature from beyond, studying different social mores with scientific distance. I am here, making art, and I wanted to deal with issues that effect me. That's one of the reasons I perform in the gallery and believe strongly in the presence of the subjective/intersubjective body. Ultimately, I am caught. I am a product of our culture. Feminism has been good to me, has allowed me to question my surroundings. I wish to remain a subjective agent. I want to be in control of myself, and do not want to succumb to external pressure. But I worry. The pressure is not just external, it is internal. I know that when I do not shave my legs, the other girls in my dance class will see them and look at each other knowingly. When a male friend jokes about women in the kitchen, I nervously laugh along and joke about being barefoot and pregnant. I try not to be complicit. I try not to call anyone a slut or a bitch. I try not to judge when I witness another woman cry, or a man cry. I try not to judge myself when I cry. All I can do are small things that effect my immediate surroundings. I can only ever be myself. *** Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958. Print. Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994. Print. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Group, 2003. Print. Gingerich, Willard. "Three Nahuatl Hymns on the Mother Archetype: An Interpretive Commentary." Mexican Studies / Estudios: 4.2 (Summer, 1988): 191-244. JSTOR. Web. 29 April 2010. Grosz, Elizabeth. "Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death." Sexy bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. New York: Routledge, 1995. 278-299. Google Scholar. 29 April 2010. Ho, Ting-jui. "East Asian Themes in Folktales of the Formosan Aborigines." Asian Folklore Studies: 23.2 (1964): 35-47. JSTOR. Web. 29 April 2010. Jackson, Bruce. "Vagina Dentata and Cystic Teratoma." The Journal of American Folklore: 84.333: (Jul. - Sep., 1971). 341-342. JSTOR. 29 April 2010. Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Print. (1) I use "disinterested" specifically, referring to Immanuel Kant's ideas about aesthetic judgment that informed formalist, Greenbergian Modernism. In Kantian aesthetic judgment, one remains disinterested in order to make a judgment that is more universal, rather than one that is mere personal taste. Harold Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters" embodied the Abstract Expressionists, but embodiment means interestedness. Bodies are interested in other bodies. In Greenbergian Modernism, the artist remains disembodied, and thus one can remain disinterested in the work in order to judge it formally.
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