I visited the Grounds For Sculpture museum in Trenton, NJ for the first time since I was five years old over spring break. It was amazing to me to see how significantly the grounds had changed in some ways, and how time seemed to stop moving completely in others. As I explored the grounds, I was forced to abandon my nostalgia and see the sculptures in a new light. And what I saw wasn't exactly pleasing.
Before I go any further into my analysis of what I witnessed at the grounds, I'd like to pause for a moment and discuss John Berger. In his book, Ways of Seeing, he discusses in great detail the roles of women in art and the concepts of nakedness versus nudity. Consider this excerpt from page 46 of the book:
... men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyor.
Back to the grounds...
An even more obvious example of this is in Woman in Bathtub. Again, the woman makes no effort to cover herself. Her legs are propped up and spread slightly apart, her arms leaned back as if she were taking a nap in a La-Z-Boy, she seems to say, "I'm sexy and I know it." But does she know it? Or is she simply doing what she thinks her male counterpart wants her to do? What he fantasizes her doing? Again, the woman only knows herself as the male sees her: an object; a site. She exists only to satisfy the male appetite, and once that hunger has been satiated, she is discarded and replaced by another work of "art."
I know, you're probably thinking I've gone off the deep end. I'm reading too much into it. Just let the art be the art, Carly. But I can't. I can't help but see how women have been idealized and objectified throughout the ages. Walk into any museum, and it'd be easier for you to count the number of paintings where women are clothed than to count when they appear nude. Perhaps the painters of long ago did not intend for this objectification. Perhaps they truly appreciated the female form, holding the female anatomy in a higher regard than the male (could you imagine all those paintings with nude men instead of women? No thank you). But if this were the case, this value has been lost and replaced by a desire to treat women as things. Objects to own and to gawk at and to help sell things (watch Jean Killborne's Killing Us Softly to really see how bad it is). The beauty of a woman is only as good as her ability to sell. To cause desire. To attract attention.
Berger's ideas about nudity and nakedness are prevalent in the art world. His notion that we as women are trained to view ourselves only as men view us is a sad but true statement. We are passive and helpless under this male gaze which has dominated our society for ages. But I still believe there is hope for change. By educating people, by exposing the fallacies, by empowering women rather than making them subservient - these are the ways in which we can change our values as a society. I think we need to seriously reconsider the way women appear in our society. We are not advertisements. We are not sex. We are not objects. We are women (hear us roar).
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972. 46, 54. Print.