(I ended up writing two posts on Blue’s post and thread. They might or might not match up with each other. I figure I’ll just put them up in tandem and let the feministas–and Blue, hopefully–discuss them either in conjunction or separately.)
Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way, but they come out looking another way, and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
-Diane Arbus
Blue over at The Gimp Parade has started a discussion about disability and porn. I was all, “Ooh, I should totally think and write about that!”
And she said:
Piny, you should write something. I was actually thinking of some trans-people’s art and portraiture of various people that queers gender enough to make exhibits of “abnormal” people a study in normality rather than a fetish exhibit. But then, there’s a difference between art and porn, of course.
And I said:
…You know, I wonder if there is such a difference for purposes of this discussion. The same issues of representation quality vs. quantity apply, as to the problems with voyeurism and exploitation, as do the problems with reaching through audience preconceptions to present full people. Look at Diane Arbus’s work, or Catherine Opie’s. And when you’re dealing with marginalization–or imposed freakishness? othering?–that’s so based on the body, nudity and portraiture can be exposing even if they aren’t immediately sexual.
Dianne Arbus was one of the first real live–as in, not long dead and not a children’s book illustrator–artists I ever encountered. I don’t know what my parents were thinking, letting me look at her work, but I loved her. I loved her because she seemed democratic: she presented everyone in the same sooty light, with the same crepey glamour.
When I was about sixteen, just about to unfurl my freak flag, I read a review of her work by a man I am pretty sure is neither a drag performer nor anything else particularly interesting. He hated her. He was outraged and insulted. Why? Well, she made people like him look like people like me, and that was an insult to people like him. It didn’t occur to him that Diane’s use of those people in direct comparison with his people could be anything other than visual contumely.
It was like getting punched in the stomach. Here I’d been looking at all these pictures and thinking, beautiful people, wonderful people, brilliant people. These pictures seemed loving, almost elegiac. These freaks were not pathetic freaks. They were proudly, casually, frankly freakish. Freakish in curlers, freakish over coffee, freakish on the living-room sofa. I was enchanted. These people were my friends. They were his enemies.
Blue is talking about the potential for solving his attitude–the idea that those bodies cannot be placed in comparison to normal bodies like his, let alone made part of any leveling, communal bodily intimacy–with exposure:
Does mainstreaming disabled people into pornography help disabled people? Does it help disabled women be seen as less asexual? Does it educate nondisabled people at all or does it just create a bigger fetish market?
In other words, will including disabled people in porn–or, more generally speaking, in overtly sexual material–allow room to acknowledge their subjectivity? Is looking like Diane a solution to turning away like this guy? Because we have to remember that Diane was herself an outsider, and that she was arguably using these people. By “use,” I don’t mean in straightforward artistic career-related ways. I mean that they were to her a facet of her internal life, that she used them to define herself:
“Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot,” she wrote. “It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
In that sense, she was a kind of fetishist: she has reduced these people to freaks, and tied all their experiences together based on one component they themselves might or might not see as primary or as common. Her fetishism is to my mind less poisonous than that guy’s disgust, given that it acknowledges that those people have thoughts and feelings and lives independent of her willingness to look at them. But she still turns these people into fables. Her reading of them sounds uncomfortably close to the myth of the supercrip, or maybe the shame-of-societycrip. I’m not sure it’s better to be an inspiration to a woman who always felt like a freak at heart. That is still objectification, and I think it would be a problem in the case of porn or explicitly sexual material that sought to be inclusive. Whereas before attitudes like that guy’s nipped any expression of disabled or otherwise freakish sexuality in the bud, now that sexuality will be validated only to the extent that audiences with Diane’s preferences accept and consume it. Still a “normal” gaze, still a “normal” standard, still a “normal” tendency to translate these bodies and these acts away into symbolic representations of sexuality’s limits.
According to that article, this is how Janet Malcolm reads those people per Diane’s pictures:
“In photographing the retarded,” Malcolm writes, “[Arbus] waits for the moment of fullest expression of disability: she shows people who are slack-jawed, vacant, drooling, uncoordinated, uncontrolled, demented-looking. She does not flinch from the truth that difference is different, and therefore frightening, threatening, disgusting. She does not put herself above us — she implicates herself in the accusation.”
For fuck’s sake. Is this better? Is it better to hear a celebration of the demented freak as mirror of humanity’s bestial self? Is that better than watching someone unwilling to make any sort of contact out of disgust? The symbolism doesn’t change, the interpretation doesn’t change. It’s just that the childhood reviewer wants to flee from the horror, and Malcolm wants to wallow in it.
Susan Sontag (again, according to the article–I’m gonna have to find and read the essay) hated these photographs:
Arbus’ photos are for Sontag the worst kind of perpetrators of this fraud: unhistorical, unpolitical, unrealistic portraits that masquerade as precisely the opposite. Arbus’ brilliance was to catch everybody unmasked, at the moment of transition between unconscious repose and practiced, social self-representation. People seemed to reveal, in that moment, their essential being, which was alienated and miserable (an Arbus photo, according to legend, revealed the misery of an otherwise happy-seeming woman soon before her suicide).
The shock of the photos is in part that they suggest to us that were Arbus standing before us with her camera, we wouldn’t perform much better, and that therefore, perhaps, we’re as miserable as the woman on the park bench, as freakish as the transvestite in curlers (who at least is aware of, and in dialogue with, his freakhood). “Arbus’s photographs,” writes Sontag, “undercut politics … by suggesting a world in which everybody is alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships.”
To Sontag, Arbus was a voyeur from the Upper West Side, a coddled depressive, a disillusioned fashion photographer, an emotional midget with an exquisite eye who sought out the marginal and the sensational because, in habituating herself to their horror, she hoped to numb her own pain. She is emblematic of the paradox of photography, that “a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life.” Arbus’ suicide, from this perspective, becomes not a proof of her sincerity, as others have read it, but a consequence of her compulsive insincerity.
Note the way she uses cripple. Was Sontag’s read based on the specific way in which Arbus photographed her subjects, or was the presence of disability, bodily difference, and sexual difference enough to make these people emblems of the horrible by definition?
The article that quoted Arbus as quoted above also asks but does not carefully answer the question of motive on the part of her subjects:
Finally, there is the question, both implicit in her photographs and central to her biography: Why did they let her do this to them? Why did the transvestite bring her home to his apartment and allow her to expose his un-normalcy — what at the time would have been called deviancy — to the world? Why did the institutions allow her access to the retarded under their care, and to what extent could the retarded have given consent? Did the “normal” people she photographed know that she would catch them precisely at the moment when, for whatever reason, they looked most freakish?
What other form of exposure was available? Who else would take portrait photographs of them? Who else would look at them at all? Maybe they were just sick and tired of being invisible.
Arbus has long been one of my favorite artists, and I’ve always seen her work as tremendously empathetic — and in many cases beautiful. When I’ve encountered criticisms like Janet Malcolm’s above, I’ve sometimes wondered whether it was me or the others who were getting her wrong.
Last summer, though, I got the chance to see the Arbus retrospective at the Metropolitan, and one of the documents they had on display was a letter she wrote to her ex-husband right after she’d developed the first prints from her Untitled project. These were the photos she took of residents of a mental institution — the photos that Malcolm described as populated by “slack-jawed, vacant, drooling, uncoordinated, uncontrolled, demented-looking” people.
Here’s how Diane Arbus described those photos:
They really are.
And I should add, I guess, that “lyric and tender and pretty” aren’t all that they are. They’re also frank and thoughtful and open-ended and compelling.
Here’s one thing that Malcolm got right — Arbus doesn’t flinch from the truth that difference is different.
While I don’t dismiss allegations of objectification, it seems like writers like Malcolm–who criticize Arbus for being a dilettante because of her class status, among other privileged positions–tend to forget that they themselves are speaking and viewing from a position of privilege. Malcolm’s no more like Arbus’ subjects than Arbus herself; what right does she have to define exploitative portrayals, given the prejudices that likely affect her interpretation of their symbolism?
I think that was kind of why I loved her so much.
I think I mostly object to where he locates that difference, and how he sees those different qualities.
Exactly. It’s a fascinating sentence: “She does not flinch from the truth that difference is different, and therefore frightening, threatening, disgusting.” Where does that “therefore” come from?
(Malcolm’s a she, by the way — it’s Janet Malcolm who wrote the passage you quote, not Malcolm Arbus.)
Seems to me the difference also has with it some humanity, one cannot deny that these are people, that they do indeed belong to the human race. That’s what I get out of seeing her work.
I’d posit then, that those who need the balance and certainty that strict notions of normalcy imply, find work such as Arbus’ confusing and even upsetting. To look at flaws in others and accept that they are in fact human leads one to two choices: to embrace that difference and chaos in that difference is the beauty of humanity of which we all belong and share some traits of difference ourselves. Or, to look at the flaws and in order to retain the balance of normalcy, see the flaws visible as representations of less than the ideal, or worse, a pollution of the ideal that requires reduction to the ‘other’.
By doing the last, in my mind, then one accepts the premise that organically humanity has no beauty, but is all shit and dirt.
No wonder then that those who embrace the latter, come out seeming rather harsh and distant; they to themselves and everyone else.
You’re right! I’ll fix the mistake in the post. I was confused by the bolded bits:
Right. We can also exoticize difference as beautiful and fascinating, which is part of the impetus towards fetishism. That’s part of this whole discussion: given the tendency whatever the attributed meaning to make people into symbolic objects, how do you protect personhood?
…Hell, how do you promulgate it in the face of exclusion from human activities?
Aha.
In a lot of the photos I like best in the Untitled series, the subjects, residents of an institution for adults with severe cognitive disabilities, are wearing Halloween masks. These photos strike me as rich with meaning and resonance: I can read them as a comment on the fact that so many are scared of disability itself, and of people with disabilities — that even when they’re not dressed up, these are people who are often seen as monsters, witches, or ghosts. I can read them as reminders of the ways in which cognitive disability disrupts the categories of “adult” and “child.” I can read the masks as symbols of the ways in which the personhood of people with disabilities is hidden and revealed by their disability.
But I also read the photos as a peek into the lived experience of these people. Arbus didn’t show up at the institution on a random day with an armload of costumes. She went, it seems obvious from the photos, at Halloween. She went and she watched and she documented how these people — people who had been institutionalized, who had been warehoused, who had in all sorts of profound ways been excluded from all sorts of human activities — occupied and amused themselves.
There is, for me, a tremendous sense of intimacy and specificity in these photos. A tremendous sense that what is being recorded is not a generic assemblage of retarded people or crazy people but individuals, captured on a particular day in particular circumstances.
If fetishism is the stripping away of specificity, the substitution of the generic and the iconic for the particular, then these photos are the opposite of fetishism. I’m not quite sure I can say the same of all of Arbus’s work, but it seems very much true of these.
The card company Blue Moon had some amputee erotica, as well as other fetish items, in their line. It took an unusual store to stock their more extreme graphics.
“What other form of exposure was available? Who else would take portrait photographs of them? Who else would look at them at all? Maybe they were just sick and tired of being invisible.”
Perhaps it is not a photo that would or should cause someone to be visible… As for pornography I feel it is the last place one should seek out any form of realization or justification for their being human with needs, desires, wants, fears, hopes, dreams, etc…for “pornography” has nothing to do what so ever with any of these…
The Greeks said, “Pornography is the writing of prostitutes” and Mamet said that “pornography isn’t art, but the opposite of art.” And with that I would tend to agree.
I am a member of the Ostiogenesis Imperfecta Foundation and find any talk of “the handicap” and “pornography” to be repugnant.
I am not a prude when it comes to porn, I simply feel it to be a degradation to art and to humanity…
Pornography has a purient nature, designed specifically to incite sexual excitement. I personally don’t see any effort at such in the expression of her photography. That someone might be excited by one photo or another is something the artist cannot control, I think intend of the producer is what makes porn such.
The line seems pretty clear to me.
I’m not an Arbus fan — her work always seems to me to be reflecting back on herself. She makes “normals” look like “freaks” and vice versa as a way of expressing her own discomfort with herself. It’s yet another case of an artist turning disabled people into props or symbols of something beyond themselves, not fully respecting them as worthy of art in themselves.
That’s not a hard and fast position, however. It’s more my gut response than something I would defend to the bitter end. Arguments to the contrary are welcome.
I have to put in here a mention of a different artist who does portraits of disabled people — the painter Riva Lehrer. She also just curated “Humans Being: Disability in Contemporary Art,” the first exhibit of its kind. (Full disclosure: She’s also my S.O.)
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Kate,
I think you meant prurient – having or intended to arouse an unwholesome interest in sexual matters.
I will agree with you there.