50

follows the noble and serene epic that Nature
chants in her harmonious cycles, repeating
herself with a touching grace of constancy and
fidelity. . . . Nature is a woman. History, which
we very foolishly put in the feminine gender,
is a rude, savage male, a sun-burnt, dusty
traveller. . . .8

Even in Matisse’s Joy of Living (1906), where
men and women share an Arcadian life, cultural
activities (music-making, animal husbandry)
are male endeavors while women exist merely
as sensual beings or abandon themselves to
emotionally expressive but artless and sponta-
neous dance.

How we relate to these works becomes a
compelling issue once their sexual-political
content is apparent. The issue, however, is diffi-
cult to grasp without first coming to terms with
the ideological character of our received no-
tions of art. For in our society, art—along with
all high culture—has replaced religion (that is,
among the educated) as the repository of what
we are taught to regard as our highest, most
enduring values. As sanctified a category as any
our society offers, art silently but ritually vali-
dates and invests with mystifying authority the
ideals that sustain existing social relations. In
art, those ideals are given to us as general,
universal values, collective cultural experience,
“our” heritage, or as some other abstraction
removed from concrete experience. Physically
and ideologically, art is isolated from the rest of
life, surrounded with solemnity, protected from
moral judgement. Our very encounters with it
in museums, galleries and art books are struc-
tured to create the illusion that the significance
of art has little or nothing to do with the con-
flicts and problems that touch common experi-
ence. Established art ideologies reinforce this
illusion. According to both popular and scholar-
ly literature, true artistic imaginations tran-
scend the ordinary fantasies, the class and sex
prejudices and the bad faith that beset other
human minds. Indeed, most of us believe that
art, by definition, is always good —because it is
of purely esthetic significance (and the purely
esthetic is thought to be good), or because it
confirms the existence of the imagination and
of individualism, or because it reveals other
“timeless” values or truths. Most of us have
been schooled to believe that art, qua art, if it is

“good” art, is never bad for anyone, never has
anything to do with the oppression of the pow-
erless, and never imposes on us values that are
not universally beneficial.

The modern masterpieces of erotic art that |
have been discussing enjoy this ideological pro-
tection even while they affirm the ideals of
male domination and female subjugation. Once
admitted to that high category of Art, they ac-
quire an invisible authority that silently acts
upon the consciousness, confirming from on
high what social customs and law enforce from
below. In their invisible and hence unques-
tioned authority, they proclaim—without ac-
knowledging it—what men and women can be
to themselves and to each other. But once that
authority is made visible, we can see what is
before us: art and artists are made on earth, in
history, in organized society. And in the mod-
ern era as in the past, what has been sanctified
as high art and called True, Good and Beautiful
is born of the aspirations of those who are em-
powered to shape culture.

My gratitude to Flavia Alaya and Joan Kelly-Gadol, whose
own work and conversation have enriched and clarified my
thinking.

1. The Female Eunuch (New York, 1972), p. 57.

2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1961)
p. 181.

3. Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel, Part 1% Art
News (Sept., 1972), pp. 20-29; and Gert Schiff, “Picasso’s
Suite 347, or Painting as an Act of Love,” in Woman as
Sex Object, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (New
York, 1972), pp. 238-253.

4. In Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley,
1970), p. 144.

5. Quoted in Max Kozloff, “The Authoritarian Personality
in Modern Art,” Artforum (May, 1974), p. 46. Schiff, op.
cit., actually advocates the penis-as-paintbrush meta-
phor.

6. De Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 179.

7. Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Cul-
ture?” Feminist Studies, 1, No. 2 (Fall, 1972), p. 10.

8. Jules Michelet, Woman (La Femme), trans. |. W. Palmer
(New York, 1860), pp. 104-105.

’

*An excerpt from the forthcoming book, The New Eros,
ed., Joan Semmel, to be published by Hacker Art Books,
New York.

Carol Duncan is an art historian who teaches at Ramapo
College. She has published in Artforum and The Art Bulle-
tin and her essay “Teaching the Rich” appears in the an-
thology New Ideas in Art Education (edited by Gregory
Battcock). She is also on the “anti-catalogue” committee of
Artists Meeting for Cultural Change.

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Now Women Repossess Their Own Sexuality. . . .