The Monster, The Muse
To be in and represent a female body in the early twenty-first century is to explore the beautiful and discarded, and tell one's story through new forms.
Image credits: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #228, 1990.
You’ve seen immortality before, remember? It surrounds you in the form of a woman. You’ve seen her face as acrylic or oil on canvas, in bronze that rusts or stone that chips. You tested her gaze and were surprised when she caught yours, eyes moving as you passed. She was a monument, remember? An attraction and marvel; unique and easily bottled into the lens of a camera to be shared and repurposed. She existed only as words in a book and you remembered her by the phrases curated by another’s imagination. She had a name that rhymed and a life easily summarised into lyrics and chords. You’ve forgotten the name of the song. You focus for a moment and she’s there, on your screen, a billboard, a cover.
She’s a muse that perhaps consented to the portrait but not the immortality, and she's not alone.
Countless women have been eternalised and remembered as muses rather than themselves throughout European history — for appearing rather than acting. Beauty, competition, vanity, innocence, judgement, possession, and submission are immortalised into a spectacle for so-called femininity to be surveyed. This has bred an assumption and an inheritance of performance. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger notes how “from the earliest childhood”, women are “taught and persuaded to survey [themselves] continually”; to watch themselves being watched and respond accordingly. It doesn’t take a man on the street or behind an easel to prompt us to perform. It’s an instinct fed to women for the purpose of survival.
To escape this constant objectification and change the way sight is projected onto them, women have made muses of themselves. Female artists, writers, activists, and innovators have left behind a fragmentation — an assortment of self-portraits, retellings, autobiographies, performances, and footprints slammed onto paths they weren’t allowed to tread. Paths that still exist today for us to pass through.
According to Lauren Elkin, to reframe their immortality, the muse had to become a monster. Monstrosity represents all a society repulses and ejects. As the borders of normality are built, all that is deemed ‘monstrous’ is cut off and forced to dwell at this boundary. Monstrosity is therefore defined by “difference and excess.” To be in and represent a female body in the early twenty-first century is to explore the beautiful and discarded, and tell one's story through new forms. In her book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Elkin writes that “to become the artists'' and “paint [themselves] into the picture”, women have to “remake the picture entirely, [find] a new language, cut it all to pieces, instigate processes of entropy, de-create to create.”
Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) de-creates through her photographically documented performance, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints). In a series of thirty-six slides, she presses a sheet of glass against her face and naked body. Her bodily features, up close and deformed by the sheet, demand attention. She alienates us through her body’s indecipherability, asserting discomfort in a reimagining of the ‘grotesque.’ She flattens and obliterates her body, disrupting how others perceive and draw conclusions about her race, gender, age, and class. The movement and transition of her face is disturbed by the violence of the viewer’s gaze. Through this, Mendieta arms herself with the aesthetic lens of abjection as a “politicised strategy”, according to Leticia Alvarado, unsettling her audiences. Deformity, here, is her weapon, as she comments on the societal biases she endured as a Cuban-American female artist. Through a series of thirteen vignettes, rather than one portrait, she not only protests gendered violence, but also the process of racialisation in the United States. Through this performance, she hybridises her identity, grounding her representation of self in intersectionality. In her introductory essay from the catalogue of her 1980 exhibition, Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, Mendieta writes that “as non-white women our struggles are two-fold. This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’”
Image credits: Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Glass on body imprints), 1972
Cindy Sherman also reimagines the self-portrait by becoming both the subject and artist. She harnesses her body as a canvas for costume and make-up, transforming herself into figures and styles stretching the Baroque period with characters like Bacchus, the Roman wine god, to the 21st century Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She exposes stereotypes through artifice, particularly focusing on gender and class identity. Through saturation and exposure, Sherman presents perception as something mediated by images that cannot necessarily be trusted. Photographs are a product of the person behind the lens, and therefore can easily manipulate and mislead.
While women are told to take up less space and draw less attention, they are simultaneously objectified into the role of the eternal subject, hung on a wall or a pedestal for others to gawk at. However, this doesn’t mean women never gazed back or tried to reinvent what it means to see. Voice was and still is used by women to make themselves material and assert themselves into a space that preferred apologies or silence. American installation artist Ann Hamilton demonstrated this tendency by asking her class of mostly young women to carry around a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood with them for a week so they could “get used to taking up more space”. On public transport, they found themselves crammed between strangers’ bodies and a material that belonged to walls. It followed them home and to class. They had to live with the scale of the space they took up at every moment. While many found themselves apologising in these moments, after a while, they also resented the need for politeness. These reactions allowed Hamilton to illustrate how art is social and a lived process that enters every aspect of one’s life. The art of installation is about creating spaces and environments that respond to a system. One must walk into the piece to prove its existence. Similarly, a woman must speak to ensure her existence isn’t ignored.
Elkin speaks to this idea of women transgressing against the restrictions of space through the concept of a “flâneuse”. A feminisation of the French word, ‘flâneur’, which originally described a man who wanders aimlessly, she subverts the expected role of a woman in a cityscape. By becoming the dawdler, observer, and surveyor, the flâneuse rejects the role of the passive muse, the objectified, and the voyeur’s victim. Suddenly, space becomes something a woman can claim and remake.
In our contemporary context, women’s immortalisation of themselves has expanded into countless new artistic and interdisciplinary forms. Photography, mixed-media, collage, projections, performance, movement, and sound have been incorporated to represent women as a multiplicity of identities, in a constant state of flux and movement, and in ‘unconventional’ or supposedly ‘unappealing’ forms and bodies. However, it’s important to note that immortalised identities and muses can not and should not be static. If one is to live forever, through art or other means, then they must also be allowed to change. Art needs to encapsulate shifts, breaks, moments of growth or deterioration, and the moments in between. Elkin writes that “nothing, not even art, can be mummified and preserved forever and that we wouldn’t want it to be.”
Immortality isn’t the final goal. It’s filling spaces with a presence, memory, history, and story that is real and changing that matters. Rather than apologise for the space we take up, we must revel in it. It’s important to pass down truths and experiences for people to relate to. Perhaps they will discard it, find it irrelevant, misunderstand it, or ignore it as they pass by on the street. Perhaps they will be inspired. Either way, we need to give them the chance — the agency — to decide.