cindy sherman + pipilotti rist:
the writing of the feminine

As this paper will explore through a critical theoretical evaluation, the mimetic work of multi generic artists Cindy Sherman and Pipilotti Rist disrupts the conventional subject/object divide of media production and presents a subversive challenge to the maintenance of binary oppositions in the dominant culture. The practical contribution that their mimetic mapping of feminine discourse presents within an institution that has traditionally excluded women’s agency, holds a critical force which brings to the fore the import of women producing representations of femininity in the media.

In This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) psychoanalytic feminist Luce Irigaray postulates that Western language is inherently phallic and represents femininity not on it’s own terms, but as a complement to masculinity. She argues that the subordination of feminine desire, representation and subjectivity under patriarchy’s phallocratic system of language provides the need for women to create a language of their own.

Irigaray argues that exercises in creating a feminine language should “attempt to thwart any manipulation of discourse that would also leave discourse intact” (1985, 80), and furthermore, that

the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively unequivocal.

As we will see through their works Untitled Film Stills and Ever is Over All, artist’s Cindy Sherman and Pipilotti Rist submit themselves to the post structural feminist project as both it’s objects and producers. Their reconfiguration of existing representations of women not only brings attention to their cultural constructions and uses, but also highlights the need for new diverse depiction’s of femininity.

Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is Over All video installation toured Australia as part of the Strange Days exhibition in 1998. Characteristically, the artist herself auteuristically fulfilled the roles of director, producer, and singer for this video. Within a small, darkened room her installation was projected for the NSWAG gallery audience. On one wall, a translucent image of flowers swaying in a field was projected. Juxtaposed on the adjoining wall, and coming to overlap this image, a woman in a flowing baby blue dress, bright red lipstick and heels strutted down a city street, smiling and carrying a large flower in her hands. This non linear narrative was accompanied by the kind of upbeat music usually associated in film with scenes of women shopping.

As the woman in the video skipped down the sidewalk she proceeded to smash in the window of a parked car with the stalk of the flower in her hands. Amongst the shower of falling glass, the woman moved on, laughing, and went on to smash in the window of the next car and the next. Later in the video a policewoman walked by, and the two women smiled at one another and went their separate ways; the narrative ending when our protagonist reached the end of the street The room was momentarily plunged into darkness until both video screens continued their endless loop.

It can be argued that Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is Over All video installation operates as a body of dissent that challenges the symbolic world with the very tools of its ordering. It’s reappropriations of what Rist terms “applied feminine culture” such as a flower, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz’s red inward turned shoes, a flowing blue dress, all reveal how very gendered patriarchal society is. The fact that mainstream society categorizes people, bodies and behaviors with such fervor in terms of modernism’s structural binary oppositions reveals the power relations inveigled in these categories, and the pervasiveness of fear within the dominant culture of the other.

The protagonist’s use of a flower as a weapon in Ever is Over All is an example of the subversive power available to society’s others. In this video Pipilotti Rist compellingly brings to bear Michel Foucault’s (1981) notion that categorization is an operation of power, and that all sites of power are matrices of transformation.. Ever is Over All reveals that in the right hands, even a flower can become a weapon in the deconstruction of normalized representations.

The flower used in Ever is Over All has has a dualistic symbolic resonance. Indeed, Monique Wittig (1980, 22) argues that “political semiology is a weapon”. And while flowers are traditional symbols of femininity, the one wielded by Rist in her video, in size and purpose, is decidedly phallic, and most certainly a symbol of power which challenges it’s gendering.

The symbolic discord that Ever is Over All evokes is reinforced by the two non traditional representations of women it provides. One of a violent woman, the other of a woman in a police uniform. Both of these women act in ways that belie the cultural expectations that their appearances set up, indeed in ways that are traditionally associated with masculinity.

Throughout it’s history the popular media has appealed to a codified set of gender behaviors often based on appearance. In the wake of such a tradition, a woman in a flowing, Laura Ashley style dress is not expected to damage a street full of cars. In turn, a woman in police uniform would be expected to apprehend a violent criminal. She does not. Instead, the women smile at one another, poised on the brink of laughter. These facial expressions, much like those in Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, are crucial signifiers of the gap between conventional representations of women within phallic discourse, and the new feminine signification’s presented by these mimetic artists.

The symbolic resonance of Rist’s representation of a police woman who has assumed authority in a patriarchal order, and yet chooses to shirk that authority in laughter, can be perceived in Luce Irigaray’s postulation (1985, 163)

Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps woman, and the sexual relation, transcend it first in laughter?

Ever is Over All symbolically provides a new female order where male laws: legal, sexual and representational, have effectively been negated. Moreover, the brand of feminism that they depict not only exhibits a dissatisfaction with increasing women’s stature in the current culture, but also breaks violently with it in the search for new ways of being.

The hyper saturated cinematography through which Rist conveys this narrative does not temper it’s critical force, but rather heightens the sense of possibility that her video offers women. In one swift move, with Ever is Over All Pipilotti Rist places her surrealistic challenge to the patriarchal ordering of the world. Indeed, Lone Bertelson’s (1996, 198) contention regarding the photography of Cindy Sherman that "the subtle appearances of wonder in Sherman’s appropriations open up a space for participation” is also pertinent to the work of Rist, which encourages active audiences both in its medium and subject matter.

This interactivity is furthered by Rist’s multi generic use of installation art, where the spatial relationship created between art text and viewer is at once immediate and requires active audiences to immerse themselves directly in her work.

Anecdotally, audience responses to Ever is Over All were ordered by gender. When I viewed it in 1998 at the NSWAG, I did so with another female and a male. When Rist and the policewoman laughed, my female friend and I did too along with some of the other women in the gallery space. Our male companion left the room at that point.. These polarized audience reactions were reminiscent of Myra MacDonald’s (1995, 42) descriptions of reactions to the film A Question of Silence, where she described

The sense of complicity between screen characters and female audience achieve(d) a power at that moment which many male critics (and male viewers) found threatening.

It can be contended that Ever is Over All, with it’s female protagonist and display of female solidarity, does subvert the male gaze which Laura Mulvey suggests mainstream film traditionally appeals to. After watching Rist's video through again, we asked our male friend about his reaction, and he said he found the kind of violence in her work pointless. His reaction suggested a form of readership divergent from our own, which had embraced the wonder and hyper realism of the situation, appreciating it’s irreality, while he claimed to have taken offense at the practicalities of the video, placing himself in the position of one of the people whose car had been vandalized. These reactions were perhaps gender based, or personality based, but nevertheless active; and although their value is anecdotal at best, it does lend some credence to Luce Irigaray’s contention that the exchange of laughter is one of the first signifiers of a break with patriarchy.

It must also be noted that Rist’s video Ever is Over All neatly negotiates the double bind of representation which Margaret Marshment (1993) describes in her paper The Picture is Political, as it attempts to neither steep itself in reality or positivity, but rather it’s power is in the sense of possibility and wonder that it evokes. Luce Irigaray, Cindy Sherman and Pipilotti Rist equally rail against the notion that there is an accurate depiction of femininity, but rather work to broaden the range of representations available, while also questioning the ideological uses to which existing representations are put.

Cindy Sherman’s photographic series Untitled Film Series similarly mimes and mocks normalized representations of women in the media. It takes as it’s subject matter 1950’s films and in each photograph Sherman, as both photographer and subject, uses a variety of sartorial styles, gestural codes and stylized environments to deconstruct representations of femininity from the past.

In one photograph Sherman lies in pearls and chiffon looking bored across a bed (Untitled Film Still #11), in another, she plays the confused office worker looking skyward amongst high-rises (Untitled Film Still #21), yet again, she stands half undressed gazing out a patio door (Untitled Film Still #7) lays half dressed starlet gazing out of frame (Untitled Film Still #6), and later poised on a staircase, gazing out of the viewer’s line of sight (Untitled Film Still #65).

Sherman does not fall into the trap of miming actual film scenes, but rather media forms. The non narrative nature of her decontextualised photographs highlights the artificial bank of imagery that the media has surrounded women with while thoughtfully engaging the viewer in the process of visual meaning making. In this, Sherman denies her viewers the distance of passive readership, instead implicating them in the subordination of women in the visual and beyond.

These photographs also exhibit Sherman’s postmodern refusal to exhibit unitary subjectivity. Indeed, Sherman’s many displays of femininity in Untitled Film Stills serve as a kind of female drag. Judith Butler (1996,137) notes drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity. Such a problematisation of gender constructs is present in the work of Rist and Sherman, which reject true forms through mimesis. Both artists similarly provide significant lacunae in their art works, spaces which encourage active readership.

Steven Shaviro, the author of Doom Patrols (1997), illuminatingly described his
reactions as a viewer to the lacunae filled work of Cindy Sherman thus:

The women in the “Untitled Film Stills” are stereotypes, puppets playing out their pre-assigned scripts. Their inner life is so utterly blocked. They are so frail, so vulnerable. They need you, it seems, to complete their story. Save me. Protect me. Penetrate me. Possess me. And so virility rides to the rescue. But isn’t that the biggest cliché of all? What’s missing from this picture? You say that women are suffering from “lack,” so that you can be the one to fulfill and complete them. But it doesn’t work. You find that these images continually slip beyond your grasp, out of your possession.

Shaviro’s contention here is that while the woman on the brink found in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills invites audience interpretations, she simultaneously diverts male desire and the male gaze. Traditional male postures of exchange, protection, domination and subordination of women under patriarchy are rebuffed by Sherman’s work.

Shaviro’s argument is that Sherman’s rejection of the scopophilic drive is so forceful that it brings Freud’s very notion of female lack into question, perfectly illustrating that the form of mimesis that Rist and Sherman engage in creates a rift that extends beyond the depiction of women in the media out into the sociopolitical realm. It is in this that the deconstructive force of Sherman’s work becomes clear.

Indeed, the powerful effect of images upon the imaginary can not be under estimated, as Laura Mulvey detailed in her paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) where she argues that the image of the castrated woman is central to phallocracy. Such images are sutured in the work of Sherman and particularly Rist, who wields a feminized phallus in Ever is Over All. Furthermore, the gaze that they construct in their artworks is not directed towards their subjects, as it is in conventional cinema, but back out into the culture which Mulvey argues pivots on images of women’s exchange and objectification. Such currencies face violent deconstruction in the hands of Rist and Sherman, whose female protagonists are uniquely situated not in relation to men, but in regards to other women and the history of their depiction.

In Doom Patrols (1997), Steven Shaviro further surmised the effect of the spatial rift evoked by the expressions of the figures in Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, writing:

These women offer you no point of approach. You can’t even readily define them as recognizable ‘types’. Their presence is too disturbingly indefinite for that. Their faces have congealed into sterile masks of anticipation, yearning, dread, fatigue, insecurity or boredom... They steal over me before I am aware of them, and somehow separate me from myself.

They come over me in waves, breaking down my self-possession and self-control. They turn me into a stereotype, drained of interiority, emotionally unbalanced and strangely vulnerable. In short, they turn me into a woman.

What Shaviro highlights here is that Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills not only divert the male gaze but interpolate the viewer into the interiority of feminine subjectivity. Whether Sherman is merely reinforcing in the visual the stereotypisation of feminine emotionality is certainly a point of contention, yet one that does not temper the sense of rupture which Sherman and Rist bring to the depiction of women in the media. The evocation of a feminine gaze is critical in the works of both Cindy Sherman and Pipilotti Rist, and indeed, would have to be crucial in the formation of any disruptive feminine language.

It is notable that Sherman’s photography also disrupts the conventions of visual grammar. Where conventional portrait photography provides the viewer with a gaze that is either an offer or a demand (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996), Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills are so ambiguous that they seem to defy placement within such dualistic categories. Furthermore, it can be argued that in both practical and symbolic terms, Rist and Sherman’s deconstructive work renders oppositional culture meaningless through their refusal to submit to it’s terminology beyond mimicry.

On this point, Shaviro (1997) concurs with the view that Sherman, like Rist, overcomes Marshment’s double bind of over positive or utopian real representations of femininity, through denying engagement in the real, and disrupting the linearity of time through their refusal to draw on specific intertextual references. He writes

The stifling intimacy of these scenarios is such, that there can be no referential ‘real’ in which to anchor them, and no Archimedean point from which to regard them. These images lure you instead into a paralysis as great as their own, into the realm of the unspeakable, the unsayable. This is what Blanchot calls the time of fascination: “the time of the absence of times, the time in which nothing begins, without negation, without decision, where before affirmation there is already the return of affirmation.

In Shaviro’s contentions, the disruption of dominant ontology that Sherman effects and it’s intersection with poststructural feminism becomes all the more visible. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), Luce Irigaray argued that on the space / time continuum, women are symbolically associated with space, while men are associated with time and “effect the passage between time and space”. However, as Shaviro postulates, the women depicted in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills negate not only the male gaze and it’s monopoly over time, but wield it themselves. Sherman does this through externalising the interiority of female emotionality whilst she lays no claims to reality; in effect negating the notion of unitary female subjectivity so often depicted in the mainstream media.

In conclusion, it can be stated that the cultural work of artist’s Cindy Sherman and Pipilotti Rist provide audiences with a practical example of Luce Irigaray’s (1985) contention that “through mimesis the possibility of women’s language may come about.” These artists mimetic portrayal of femininity questions not only it’s depiction in the popular media, but it’s construction and ideological effects in the dominant culture at large. It can be argued that the possibility of Luce Irigaray’s feminine language and discourse is indeed offered in Pipilotti Rist’s and Cindy Sherman’s artworks Ever is Over All and Untitled Film Stills.

References:

Babias, M. (1996) When Dreams Twitch Like Dying Fish, Parkett Nr. 48, pp 104-107. Courtesy of the artist’s website http://www.eyekon.ch

Bertelson, L. (1996) Nobody’s Here But Me: Cindy Sherman’s Photography and the Negotiation of a Feminine Space’, in Hayward, P. (1998) Picture This: Media
Representations of Visual Art and Artists, 2nd Ed, London, John Libbey, pp 197-202.

Butler, J. (1996) Subversive Bodily Acts in Gender Trouble, Routledge, New York.

Foucault, M. (1981) The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, Penguin, Harmonsworth.

Irigaray, L (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One, Trans Porter, C. Burke, C. Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, New York.

Irigaray, L (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Trans Burke C, Gill, G, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, New York.

Kress, G; Van Leeuwen, T (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, NY, pp 124-130.

Kristeva, J. (1982) Approaching Abjection in Powers of Horror, trans Roudiez, L.
Columbia University Press, New York.

MacDonald, M (1995) Voices Off: Women, Discourses and the Media in
Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media, p 42.

Marshment, M (1993) The Picture is Political: Representation of Women in
Contemporary Popular Culture in Richardson, D; Robinson, V Introducing Women’s Studies: Feminist Theory and Practice, Macmillan, London.

Mulvey, L (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Screen Vol 16, No 3,
Autumn 1975, pp 6-18.

Rist, P (1997) Ever Is Over All Video Installation. (Please see Appendix 1)

Shaviro, S. (1997) Chapter 7: Cindy Sherman in The Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction, Serpent’s Tail, New York.

Sherman, C (1978) Untitled Film Still (#7)

Sherman, C (1978) Untitled Film Still (#21)

Sherman, C (1978) Untitled Film Still (#11)

Sherman, C (1977) Untitled Film Still (#6)

Sherman, C (1980) Untitled Film Still (#65)

Smith, E. (1997) A Glance: Cindy Sherman; Retrospective, Thames and Hudson.

Tunnicliffe, W. (1998) Pipilotti Rist in the Strange Days Exhibition Guide, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Wittig, M (1980) The Straight Mind in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1980) Boston Press, Boston.

Article © Vanessa Long 1999

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