Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper shows how Joan Semmel’s work destabilizes the spectator’s expectations of the female nude and pose a challenge to the artworld and the broader culture. John Berger famously claims that men act and women appear, a situation reinforced by Western visual culture, particularly Western painting. Women, on his analysis, thus exist in what W.E.B. DuBois would call “double-consciousness.” Almost fifty years after Berger’s work, women are still seen as bodies lacking agency–years during which men, too, have become anxious about their desirability and women have ascended economically and socially. What about older women? They do not appear, because they are invisible (unless they live in the stratosphere of power and prestige). Phenomenologically, one who has defined herself through the male gaze would no longer feel an object of desire. Thus, to occupy an aging body would be traumatic. As with any trauma, one must repress or displace it. Remarkably, however, some contemporary women artists have directly confronted aging through nude self-portraiture. For example, photographer Sarah Bloom photographs herself nude in abandoned buildings. Her photographs reflect her grief over the loss of her once-nubile identity. In contrast, some women painters, such as the noteworthy Alice Neel and Joan Semmel, have unapologetically given us self-portraits that depict their aging and aged bodies. Semmel’s work is especially commanding because by eroticizing her own aging body, she subverts some lingering social and artistic values. The fineness and originality of Semmel’s oeuvre show that Berger is right about the rhetorical power of visual representation.