A Room With A Lesbian View
one story out of many

Suzanne van Rossenberg 2004

a thesis written for graduating MA Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam/Plymouth University, England under tutorial guidance of Laurence Rassel (Constant VZW) and Frans-Willem Korsten (University of Leiden)

Contents.

Preface
Chapter 1. The drawings
Chapter 2. Next to the drawings
Chapter 3. Before the drawings
Chapter 4. After the drawings (Conclusion)
List of references

Preface.

I framed my visual research for my MA degree with the question: Could labelling myself a lesbian artist be a useful strategy to break stereotypical ideas about femininity, masculinity, homosexuality and heterosexuality? The MA report will explain how this question relates to a series of drawings and paintings of the Hooglandse Kerk, a Gothic Church in Leiden –titled A Room With A Lesbian View. My scientist friends told me that my research question was not really a proper one. I agree with them. I have always liked manifestos.

From October 2004 I have been writing short stories. The stories have become quite important in understanding the (science-)fictional elements in my drawings and paintings. Telling stories seems a logical step, after finding out that my point of view differed from other people’s point of views, and the ones I had been taught when I was young. In order to have fun, one needs imagination, not aiming to create a fictional world to flee in, but to make already “constructed” stories in “real life” liveable, and transformable.

I don’t know if I am using the theories of Immanuel Kant, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler and Donna Haraway “correctly.” Through interplay between my art practice and reading theories, I find a language to talk about my visual work. My playfulness with theories is perhaps creating inconsistencies. I noticed, for example, that I tend to swap female, feminist and lesbian very easily. I think that artists’ stories like these will not harm any scientist’s story.

“What do you do next to your job?” I asked.
“I am an amateur painter,” you answered.
“What is that? I’ve never used this term.”
“I look for parts of paintings I like and reproduce them on canvas.”
“Do you feel ever scared to start to paint on a new bright white canvas?”
“That is really the most exciting part, Suzanne. I love these first strokes.”

I have been taught to think about the meaning of the place and the colour of the first stroke, before this same stroke. This doesn’t make it easy to paint or draw. With A Room With A Lesbian View I created a frame that allowed me to enjoy painting and drawing, leaving behind my need to be able to reason the visual language.I created a frame that allowed amateurism.

I don’t know exactly what the series of drawings and paintings formally “say.” Maybe you will prefer some drawings to other drawings. Maybe you will be attracted by some parts of the paintings more than other parts. Maybe you will call some “bad” and others “good,” as every spectator will form her/his own personal opinion. This doesn’t mean there is any hierarchy between the works. My drawings and paintings are traces. The spectator creates the story between the individual works.

Suzanne van Rossenberg, June 2004.

“Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” (Haraway, 1991a, p.176)

Chapter 1. The drawings.

1.1 Introduction.

The series A Room With A Lesbian View are drawings and watercolour paintings of the Hooglandse Kerk, a Gothic Church in Leiden. On every drawing the date and time of finishing this same drawing is mentioned. In January 2004 I showed a first group of drawings to students of the Piet Zwart Institute. Some wondered if the drawings were an (deliberate) insult to the tradition of drawing. Some expressed that they really loved some of the drawings. Others experienced the series as a sort of diary or the possibility to try out a range of different styles. Few students were looking for the “lesbian view” in the drawings.

The discussable quality of the first drawings of A Room With A Lesbian View, obviously lead to a problematising of art criteria. The fact that one could not agree on the quality of the drawings, was not worrying the art students, because they understand and have experienced how “bad” art can function within a certain context.
“Suzanne, why did you choose these materials and this size of the paper?” “Why didn’t you use more different materials?” “Why didn’t you use the same pen in every drawing?” “Why didn’t you consequently imitate art historical painting styles?” “Why are you not making one drawing a day at eight o’clock in the morning?” “Why are you only mentioning the time the drawing is finished and not the time you started?”
If the collection of drawings was a comment on art criteria and taste, the students concluded I had done a bad job. I could have made my intentions as the maker of the drawings much clearer. The series was not consistently or constructively enough referring to the questions “What is art?” and “What is taste?” Indeed, I hadn’t decided to do so, and that made me conclude that apparently the work was about something else.

1.2 The frame.

I keep drawing the church because I enjoy drawing and painting as a meditative action. While drawing my thoughts go everywhere, from feminist theory to the dishes, to my childhood, and back to the drawings thinking about art and taste. One could say that I merely let time pass, and that is true. I am creating a narrative.

I like to tell stories. I have begun writing short stories on my MA tutor Laurence Rassel’s request to leave traces of my process of making art. Putting thoughts on paper, like in a diary, I discovered that the moment I put “I” on paper, I was no longer this person. There was absolutely no reason to believe the things that this “personnage” was telling the reader. Experiencing the ambiguous trustworthiness of my own words, I realized that the distinction between the “I” who is writing and the “I” who is telling the story could also be applied to my drawing practice.
I am the initiator of the drawings and paintings, but as soon I scratch down a line on paper or make a stroke with a brush, it isn’t my personal story about the Hooglandse Kerk in Leiden, about art and taste, about performativity and identity politics anymore, but the narrator’s. But yes, a story that I would like told.

While drawing and painting I am making decisions, consciously, unconsciously and/or intuitively, where to put the next line, stroke or smudge. When I started to draw the church, I think I was aiming to represent the church as best as possible. In the beginning I was very much busy with looking and drawing, and again looking. At a certain point I noticed that it didn’t help to look more closely to make a “better” drawing. At this moment I know the lines and proportions of the church by heart. This doesn’t guarantee “good” drawings.
While aiming for a “good” drawing or satisfying representation of the church, I sometimes feel happy with the result of my drawing. But wait a minute, what are the criteria I that are making me feel content about the result? Having the opinion that I don’t contain a universal sense for good art, I have to conclude that I am using criteria for art that are culturally and academically taught to me, “constructed.”
The moment I feel disappointed that my drawing and watercolour skills are not that developed enough to make representations of the church that look like the paintings and etches I see in the shop-windows around the church, I simultaneously feel the strength of transgressing my own constructed criteria. “Bad” drawings are as enjoyable to make as “good” drawings.
There is a challenge in making deliberate mistakes, transgressing one’s own rules, and tackling one’s own taste, realizing “my own” taste is as much constructed as a “universal” ideal of beauty. The joy of drawing and making is as much in learning to use the visual means and listening to the materials, as in deliberately ruining the composition —as if this is possible…
It is the complexity to judge “good” and “bad” and postponing art judgements that makes art politically interesting for me. It is the exploring of good, bad and everything in between that makes the act of drawing necessary.

Remembering the comments of the students on the first drawings of the church, as mentioned above, I indeed could not give reasons, for example, for the size of the paper, the materials I had used, drawing on those particular days or the presence of those particular phone numbers on the drawings. A more structured method —for example chance operations that John Cage used— could have answered questions concerning these visual elements.

Indifference, as a method of making art, can make the audience feel uncomfortable how to judge a work of art. In order to be able to form an opinion about the compositions of John Cage or the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, a spectator needs context. One could say that “taste judgements” are being postponed.
In order to be able to draw I applied a temporary, constructed indifference towards my personal criteria for “good” drawings. One day I concluded: “I am indifferent to structuring my indifference.” But what does it say?
I am not indifferent at all. I feel affinity with indifference as a method in making art, because it sharpens the questions that matter. I like how indifference can be applied to make decisions. My conclusion about my own indifference explains my need to explore “good” and “bad.”

From March 4 2004 I started to write the title of the work, A Room With A Lesbian View, on the drawings next to the date and time the drawings were finished. The text got an explicit spot in the composition of the drawings, unlikely the notes I have been making on some of the drawings. In some drawings the title functions as a signature. In others the title became part of the whole composition, or even a drawing on its own. The stylized quality increases the doubt about the trustworthiness of the times and dates on which the drawings suppose to be made. The authenticity of the maker, e.g. represented by a signature, can be questioned. The absence of a signature of the “artist” emphasizes a fictional narrator, analogously with the situation in my short stories. Catching myself sometimes being busy with the composition of text instead of representing the church was increasing the indifference towards making a "good" drawing. I welcomed this.
The moment I get confused over making a “good” drawing, or a “bad” drawing, is also the moment I can infiltrate in the tradition of drawing, art history, and philosophical discourses about taste, and stir the performance of art criteria lightly, but visibly –not too hard because then I would reinforce what I attempt to transgress.

1.3 The paint.

My drawings are the result of me drawing, showing a lesbian, cyberfeminist narrator, instead of telling the autobiography of Suzanne van Rossenberg. On a micro level I am experiencing the impossibility of stepping outside a certain art tradition or discourse, the impossibility of subverting art criteria without creating a new story, a new set of criteria. In repeating transgressing my own constructed art criteria, I hope to show the performative characteristics of applying art criteria, a story Marcel Duchamp and John Cage told before me.

I derive the adjective ‘cyberfeminist’ from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1991). This future vision takes position in contemporary political and scientific debates.
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind.” (Haraway, 1991a, p.149)
“Ambivalence towards the disrupted unities mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of ‘clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology’ versus ‘manipulated false consciousness’, but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game.” (Haraway, 1991a, pp.172-173)

Transgressing the repetition of performativity creates new repetitions, new stories. Creating the story of a “lesbian” artist deconstructs the possible “heterosexual” view of an audience, because every spectator is forced to question her/his own view, in comparison with the “lesbian” view. After the conclusion that the drawings cannot be easily defined as “lesbian” (what makes these drawings differ from “heterosexual” drawings?), the drawings therefore refer to the construction of identities.
A lesbian view exists as much as it doesn’t exist, because lesbianism exists as much as it doesn’t exist, like heterosexuality and bisexuality. While naming sexuality, a story is being made, a construction, but this doesn’t mean that the terms “heterosexual” and “lesbian” are not useful, or for use.

“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.” (Haraway, 1991a, p.181)
Building and destroying identities coincide. While constructing a lesbian identity in my work I am simultaneously deconstructing stereotypical ideas about homosexuality and heterosexuality. The lesbian narrator in the drawings not only infiltrates in an art philosophical discourse and comments on it, but also puts herself in the discussion around identity politics and power. Art is a tool for subversion.

Chapter 2. Next to the drawings.

When I taught her to play backgammon, she mastered it very quickly. And though backgammon is a rather chance based game, I wasn’t able to beat her one single time. It was a pity we stopped playing. She didn’t want to. She said she got bored of winning.

2.1 Methods.

When feminist scientists started to rewrite history, in order to include more women in historical overviews or different perspectives on historical facts, they discovered that it is impossible to create an objective history. Describing history, even done with the most integrity, turned out to be impossibly neutral, un-political, or un-gendered. Even if we would like to believe that there is one universal history of mankind, or one universal philosophy, feminist and postcolonial studies have made clear the impossibility of writing it down or discovering it, due to our own methodologies.
When rules for science are being discussed and criteria are being deconstructed, the constructiveness of “truth” has been opening up discussions beyond hierarchal binary oppositions, which Western philosophers have been so fond of using. On the other hand one could wonder if this relatively young science-philosophical insight also means a self-created end of science. How can deconstructing criteria for science, be constructive?

In Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective Donna Haraway criticises the deconstructive characteristics of post-modernist science: “We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our ‘embodied’ accounts of the truth, and we ended up with one more excuse for not learning any post-Newtonian physics and one more reason to drop the old feminist self-help practices of repairing our own cars.” (Haraway, 1991b, p.186) In order to keep science constructive, and not only science philosophical, Donna Haraway reclaims objectivity: “The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The ‘equality’ of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical enquiry.” (Haraway, 1991b, p.191)

As soon as an artist puts a work into “the world,” the moment when it is presented to an audience, art judgements can be made based on the information spectators derive from the work. As soon as the work is put in a public environment, the artist has to and will take responsibility for its meaning. I must come to the conclusion that art cannot deconstruct art or art philosophical discourses, when an artist doesn’t deny the audience the work, or the work the public. When art is always “constructive,” there is space for an artist, rather than for a scientist, to play with taking responsibility, commenting on art criteria within the “inescapable” discourse of relativism.

“I hate the myth of an inescapable discourse,” I told her just after she beat me in a game of jackstraws. “There has always been a network of discourses and positions, instead of the so-called linear development that at a certain point demanded diversity and multiplicity.” “It is, of course, hard to climb when you are holding on to both ends of a pole, simultaneously or alternately. It is, therefore, time to switch metaphors (Haraway, 1991b, p.188),” I quoted. She didn’t hear me. She was under the table picking up the jackstraws. She had dropped them all.

As I remarked earlier, “indifference” can be used to play with taking responsibility for the end result. Marcel Duchamp was trying to avoid visual language, by being indifferent towards materials of which artworks should be made. John Cage was indifferent towards the end result, by basing end products on chance operations. Though these methods could not escape “taste,” they were able to use the space, created by postponing taking responsibility, as their playground in order to comment on taste judgements, before these same taste judgements were made.
I used chance operations with dice in my work a couple of years ago. There was no reason for me to make use of dice, and I didn’t continue. I didn’t feel the need of applying a Zen-Buddhist aim of art, imitating Nature, and I didn’t particularly have a fascination for throwing dice. I haven’t come across other “structuring” chance operations I was tempted to use.

2.2 Heterosexuality as political institution.

One day I took off to Moon to calm down in one of these old-fashioned Shimmy Shuttles that my mum built when she was young. I got stuck in a dialectical field and needed to wait a couple of hours for the correct energy balance, in order to return to normal analogical speed. Space can be quite suffocating at times like these.

In Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1981) Adrienne Rich holds a plea for a lesbian continuum made by power and co-operation of all women, lesbian, heterosexual, black and white. I am interested in the first part of her argumentation that leads to questioning of heterosexuality.
First of all Rich takes over Kathleen Gough’s list that characterizes eight forms of male power, including the power of men. She lists examples for (1) to deny women [their own] sexuality (2) or to force it (3) to command or exploit their labor to control their produce (4) to control or rob them of their children (5) to confine them physically and prevent their movement (6) to use them as objects in male transactions (7) to cramp their creativeness (8) to withhold from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments. “These are some of the methods by which male power is manifested and maintained. Looking at the schema, what surely impresses itself is the fact that we are confronting not a simple maintenance of inequality and property possessions, but a persuasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness, which suggests that an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained.” (Rich, 1993, pp.233-234)

Naming all male power in the witness of sexual violence and domination of women, could make clear that living in a world where (sexual) power is literally most of the times in the hands of men, is a disadvantage to every women in one way or the other. I agree that all women are victims to a certain degree, without denying the same could be said for men.
Rich quotes Kathleen Barry: “…and with naming and conceptualizing female sexual slavery, as Barry clearly sees, compulsory heterosexuality.” “As sexual power is learned by adolescent boys through the social experience of their sex drive, so do girls learn that the locus of sexual power is male.” The fact that children are taught to behave in a certain way not only reinforces heterosexuality but also “renders invisible of the lesbian possibility.” (Rich, 1993, pp.237-238)
It is a fact that in a world structured on powers of men, lesbianism or lesbian existence has had a hard time being taken seriously. I think Rich is right when she makes a call to recognize and study heterosexuality, like motherhood, as a political institution.

While arguing that “woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality” (1993, p.244) towards a “lesbian continuum,” Rich shows awareness that conquering male power is more complex than attacking it with female power. She asks: “We still need to ask why some women never, even temporarily, turn away from “heretofore primary relationships” with other females. And why does male identification -the casting of one’s social, political, and intellectual allegiances with men- exist among lifelong sexual lesbians?” (Rich, 1993, p.237)

2.3 Performativity.

Judith Butler makes clear that power relations are complexly entangled with gender identities.
“Indeed, the field of power structured in part by imperializing gesture of dialectical appropriation exceeds and encompass the axis of sexual difference, offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other candidate for the position of ‘primary condition of oppression’.” (Butler, 1990, p.19)
To read Butler you have to agree with her assumption that identities are for a great part constructed by factors outside a person. For example: “In other words, the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility.” (Butler, 1990, p.23)

For me personally this makes a lot of sense, recognizing the influence of upbringing and education on my behaviour and norms I am living, and experiencing the influence of other people’s behaviour on my own acting. Being busy with looking for “the self” in myself, a sort of “essence,” I realized that behind all these different roles I have been taught to play, there is no self. Or, that the self is at least not defined by one identity, but exists as part of many. Butler handed me a tool to look differently to the world.

Very simplified, though doing no justice to any feminist theory with this simplification, one could say that gender produces gender. To quote Butler (1990, pp. xiv-xv): “In the first instance, then, the performativity of gender revolves around this metalepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits outside itself. Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieved its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.”

There is a group of people that biologically don’t fit in the categories male or female, being either both, or none of both. Next to this there are people who feel restricted by terms like feminine, masculine, heterosexual or homosexual. I don’t have objections to differences, only when a hierarchy in these differences has an influence on social positions, or when narrow-mindedness leads to misunderstandings on femininity, masculinity, homosexuality and heterosexuality.
When we agree that identities are constructed by factors outside a person and are reproduced as unwritten rules by performing gender roles, the meaning of terms like feminine and masculine are becoming more complex. But of course, they don’t need to be expelled from language.

It is not easy to break the constructed borders between sexual and gender identities –and this is still something I would like to do, agreeing with Butler, when she writes (1990, p.xii):
“Certainly, I do not mean to claim that forms of sexual practice produce certain genders, but only that under conditions of normative heterosexuality, policing gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality.”
Do drag queens (men dressing up as women) and drag kings (women dressing up as men) obviously acting subversively, break stereotypical ideas? One could even argue they are reinforcing stereotypical ideas, coming back to Rich’ dilemma when she talks about male identification of lesbians. To contextualize the problem in Butler’s terminology:
“If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is ‘before’, ‘outside,’ or ‘beyond’ power is a cultural impossibility and a politically impracticable dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself.” (Butler, 1990, p.40)

Transgressing unwritten rules in order to break stereotypical ideas on femininity, masculinity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, seems as hard as transgressing art criteria. The repetition of gender performativity is comparable with the repetition of art criteria. “That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped –as if it could be.” (Butler, 1990, p.42)
The comparison between the (im)possibility of subverting art criteria and gender roles, inspires me to continue making art, noticing how theory can make layers in my work visible to me. And when Butler (1990, p.42) asks the question “What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?”
I answer: “The practice of art of course!”


Chapter 3. Before the drawings.

“Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and cyberfeminism, are not to be talked about; they need to be practiced to exist,” I improvised one day. She wrote it down, and quoted it to Marcel Duchamp and John Cage the next time they were playing chess in her dream.

3.1 John Duchamp and Marcel Cage.

John Cage (1912-1992), artist and composer, questioned communication as the aim of art. He noticed in the beginning of his career, that when he conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh. John Cage was not interested if people liked his music or not. By using chance operations in his music and visual work he intended to eliminate his personal choices and taste. The end result was dictated by choices in the framework of chance, and did not express an intention of the artist. An example of this are the drawings based on the I Ching, a Chinese oracle book, that he eventually also transformed into a computer programme. The meaning of the work was expressed in the method, not in the end result.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) argued that repeating art criteria leads to taste. When art criteria are repeated, for example one style of painting, an art audience will be able to recognise “good” art based on these criteria. Duchamp would call this taste.
From 1913 he started to make ready-mades, objet-trouvé’s that are neither supposed to be "loved nor hated after two weeks by the audience" in Duchamp's words, demanding an indifferent attitude towards the objects. To avoid taste through repetition, Duchamp was forced to reduce his ready-mades to once a year.

The moment Duchamp and Cage let daily life enter their art, these artists found both art and daily life intensified. Marcel Duchamp saw no difference between daily life and art. For him making a piece of work was as important as going for a walk or a visit to the cinema.
Cage found a new aim for art ?instead of communication?: art should imitate Nature. Inspired by Zen Buddhism he was trying to find ways of showing the unpredictable ways of Nature. Both Cage and Duchamp argue in their work that criteria for what is called “good” art, are not qualities of the objects of art itself, but mostly constructed outside the object by the art audience.

3.2 Nature/nurture.

In 1790 Immanuel Kant used a thought like this to formulate an aesthetic theory. He argued in the Analytik des Schönen, the first book of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, that the Beautiful is not part of the object, but a manifestation in the subject that perceives the object. (de Visscher, 1978, p.8)

With experiencing the artwork, the spectator can come to a “reflective taste judgement.” Following up Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) and Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), Kritik der Urteilskraft was meant as a synthesis between them, a synthesis between Knowledge and Will. Reflective taste judgements will become an “aesthetical categorical imperative” as a result of interplay between Reason and Imagination. By using this third power, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, an individual can transform the singular, particular art experience into participation in the universal. “Taste is a free power and in this case freedom means the independency of the particular and participation in the universal.” (de Visscher, 1978, p.14)

Kant’s “aesthetical categorical imperative,” the art judgement that individuals will come to in experiencing art, is based on the presumption that everybody takes part in universal structures, which are to be found in Nature. To show the unconscious ways of operations in Nature, John Cage must assume that everybody perceives Nature similarly, and that Nature manifests itself in one universal, innocent way, uninfluenced by Culture.

The fact that individual spectators experience same taste judgements is for Kant evidence that the Beautiful universally exists. Duchamp hoped that by having different taste experiences of his work, spectators would become aware of the fact that “universal” criteria for “good” art were merely a result of a series of agreements.
Coming to a reflective art judgement, by searching for laws and rules that are not given either a priori or a posteriori, presumes that judgements are “necessary”. Kant argues that we experience all images in perspective of pleasure and displeasure, comfort and discomfort. (van den Braembussche, 1996, p.156) Did not Duchamp try to escape these “necessary” judgements by choosing ready-mades that will not be loved nor hated by its audience?

Like Marcel Duchamp I question if universality can be proven from art experiences of individuals in the phenomenal world. I would rather argue the other way around: the noumenal beautiful could be a result of a series of agreements that are called universal but are in fact constructed by a small group of art spectators, who were probably actually all white and male in Kant’s time. There is for me no reason not to call (“good”) taste the result of inter-subjective art criteria that are repeated over and over again.

3.3 Taste.

John Cage’s “transgressive art actions” -denying communication as an aim of art-, were possible, because he applied a distinction between content and form of an artwork. It was renewing to place the meaning in the method he was applying, the chance operations, instead of the visual appearance or language of the results of these chance operations.
Arthur Danto argues that the era of taste developed into an era of meaning, when Marcel Duchamp started to make his ready-mades. Basically the art audience needs a philosophy to be able to make a distinction between art and daily life. (Danto, 2000, p.217) Art became philosophy, and the audience needed to know the context within which they could judge the “visual language” of the objects.
This doesn’t mean that from that moment visual art disappeared, or that it was freed from inter-subjective taste judgements. Besides that, spectators have “cyborgly” developed. We are nowadays completely fine with calling Cage’s methods the form of the work, the actual object. Methods and process-based artworks have become visual languages, and do communicate and express meaning in their visual appearance. Nowadays it would be impossible to make controversial art with Cage's methods.

When an artwork is presented, ready to be shown to an audience, the artist applied certain criteria that immediately contextualize the work. These criteria, or context, ought to be known by the audience to come to a judgement on the work. Even if an artist is transgressing the rules of what art is supposed to be (i.e. the by repetition constructed, inter-subjective set of criteria), the system of applying art criteria, ergo “taste,” is not broken. The moment when an artwork —whether material or not— is presented to an audience, the transgressive element will vanish. It is impossible to comment on taste, while escaping taste, or vice versa.

Artists have been offering visual products in the broadest sense of the word, from text to imaginary pictures, from replicas to a urinal. Even if subverting art criteria is one of the artist's tools, the artwork will impossibly stand outside the discourse of repetition leading to taste. Artists have, for example, conquered public space as their playground in attempt to escape white-cube setting and to comment on gallery and museum politics. Public space has been absorbed by art space, that seems to have become pleasantly elastic, and follows the artist everywhere.

One could conclude that all art has had to become a matter of taste based on the application of art criteria. This is not a bad thing. It is exactly this that makes art judgements possible nowadays.

The current appreciation for Cage’s work could be a combination of a love for the controversies of historical avant-gardist art actions and the enjoying of the actual sound of his compositions or the visual appearance of his drawings. At the John Cage festival in 2002 in Amsterdam, I was touched by one of Cage's music pieces and his 'non-intended' sounds, knowing that a) the work, b) the context and c) the perception of the audience differed from fifty years ago.

3.4 After taste.

When the art-philosophical questions like “What is art?” and “What is taste?” are being expelled as tools to comment on taste, it is hard to come up with reasons to continue making art. What is the sense of aiming for renewal within a discourse that doesn’t allow any renewal?
It doesn’t worry me to call art taste as a result of “performing” art criteria. I am, like many more people in my environment, not bothered by paradoxes, experiencing the power of simultaneously deconstructing and building art criteria. Moreover, I should not forget that these paradoxes are a result of dichotomies I tend to use in reflecting on my production of art, and are as unreal as the universality of art criteria, or the possibility of avoiding “taste” judgements.

Isobel Armstrong discusses for example in the introduction of her book The Radical Aesthetic some statements of Roger Scruton taken from his essay ‘Photography and representation,’ referring to art as conventions. And though a statement like “Emotions require education” seems plausible in all kinds of art, social and psychological contexts, Armstrong is correct when she says: “Scruton assumes a static world of form and convention.” (Armstrong, 2000, pp.8-9)
“It is impossible to rest the full weight of a culture on fixed forms and conventions, much less to see these as a communal mode of ethical training in which the ethical is elided with an abstract aestheticism.” (Armstrong, 2000, p.9) Marcel Duchamp’s refusal of statements on ethics within art contexts is not likely to be understood as constructive or productive.

Being pulled between simplifying dichotomies in order to grasp something of art philosophical discussions and being taught to think more differentiated based on more information, I have been experiencing the strength of art and its continuous transforming, while undermining itself, or vice versa. Or to use words of Armstrong: “Aesthetic production continues, and always will, whatever the exhaustion of theoretical accounts of the aesthetic.”

3.5 Aesthetic production.

At art college I found out that my joy for doing repetitive, meditative actions could be used in an art context, and therefore in my art practice. I started to sew and embroider, utilizing the added humorous layer instead of feeling guilty about doing “women’s” tasks. In 2002 I did a performance in Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, sewing pages of paperback romance novels (Mill’s Boon) together, after I changed in one story the male protagonist into a female, an in another the female into a male. The changes made in the text are enjoyable to read. For example when a man in a white dress walks elegantly down the stairs, which is of course not that uncommon in contemporary society. The stereotypical elements in Mill’s Boons and Harlequins are perfect for overthrowing customs and making unwritten rules visible.
During the performance I talked with the visitors of the museum about my work, the topics I was discussing and art in general. Though small, it was in fact a comparable event to creating an environment for people to speak with the organising of the trans / gender symposium (January 2003) and the editing of the trans / gender magazine (October 2003) together with Nina Höchtl.

A year ago I discovered that in lesbian contact ads, about 30% of women describe themselves and/or the one they were looking for, as “feminine” women. There was even one lesbian describing her self and the one she was looking for, as a woman with “hetero-looks.” I was surprised that for women who clearly don’t live the “normal” heterosexual life, stereotypical “heterosexual” descriptions are useful. This indicates that deconstructing stereotypical ideas is more than revealing stereotypical ideas in society.
As a result of the research above, I did a performance called “one night stand”. Together with a female friend I sewed 256 A4 sheets together on two sewing machines. The 256 sheets were a result of enlarging one sheet with dozens of times written on it “You make me feel like a natural woman.” Within the process of enlarging on a copy machine, words were broken and letters disappeared. By sewing the copies together the sentence was being reconstructed. I intended to make clear that deconstructing the stereotypical “heterosexual” sentence doesn’t mean this sentence doesn’t have meaning anymore for me as a lesbian, identifying myself with either the “you” or the “me” in “You make me feel like a natural woman.”
Unfortunately the lesbian connotations were not noticed by a large part of the audience. I was quite offended by the “heterosexual” gaze of the audience. Though realizing the impossibility of being part of one larger group of lesbians –what is the definition of lesbianism anyway? - I felt the need to call my work “lesbian.”

Chapter 4. After the drawings (Conclusion)

4.1 The Room

After rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own (1929) she kept on pestering for 500 English Pounds a year and a room with a lock. I gave her my mum’s old Shimmy Shuttle for her birthday. The 500 English Pounds were of course impossible to find.

“For women have set indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” (Woolf, 1981, p.87)

Trying to form opinions about the society one is living in, about the world, about communication and language, i.e. positioning oneself, can be a solitary business. Practicing art is for me important for taking position towards the world, people, art world, friends, colleagues, and myself. I like to do things on my own. I need a fair time to waste in order to keep productive and caring. And when someone would ask why I feel tempted to be part of a universal art tradition, taking position in a linear art history, I would have to answer that it was something I could do, on my own, struggling my way through art history and while reacting, taking a position.

On the other hand positioning oneself cannot be solitary at all. Next to the fact we are influenced by social factors, trends, and moods of the people surrounding us, it is exactly the communicating with others that creates a language for positioning, an always changing vocabulary. Every line I scratch down, every word I put on paper quietly and alone in my own room, is a political one, as Adrienne Rich also pointed out in her profession as a poet. Every personal action seems to be as essential as it is inherent to communicating or “networking” with other people.

4.2 The installation

The graduation exhibition in Tent. gives me the opportunity to share to A Room With A Lesbian View with other people. It is also the moment the work can be “judged”. Presenting it in public space, I will take responsibility for the body of work.

The decision how to install the drawings includes again the context I have been using to talk about my work. How can I decide on the installation of the drawings and paintings? It could be a time-line with all the drawings and paintings in a chronological order, escaping a personal choice while installing them. The spectator actually doesn’t need this time-line, because the dates and times are written on each drawing. Moreover, with escaping “personal choices” I would not get beyond the myth of the inescapable art philosophical discourse of taste, repeating decisions of male heterosexual artists that came before me. I have decided to put them “randomly” on the wall, working with my own “constructed” taste and preferences, intuition, talent for composition –whatever you would like to call it.

Not allowing myself to “reason” the installation is comparable with the drawing and painting, playing with the use of criteria for “good” and “bad”. In a try-out installation in my studio (June) I noticed that the distinction between “good” and “bad” drawings disappeared. When the drawings are installed, it is not easy to call one “bad” and another “good.” Though only mentioning it now, making the church —easily called a symbol of masculinity— the subject of a “lesbian” view, is of course an obvious comment. I do not think I am reinforcing the “power” of this symbol by repetitively drawing this church, but rather transforming it to something else, while drawing. After half a year of drawing, I still think the Hooglandse Kerk is a beautiful church. Did you know that the nave of the church was never finished due to an economic downturn in 1535? Also the tower is missing.

4.3 The lesbian gaze

In this report I have argued that my question if labelling myself a lesbian artist could break stereotypical ideas around femininity, masculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality can be answered with: “Yes, it could.” Because identities are not easily defined by one-dimensional terms as “heterosexual” or “lesbian,” this answer doesn’t seem very satisfying.
My aim is to deconstruct a “heterosexual” view of the audience. But what does that mean? Would you think that a lesbian identity excludes heterosexuality? Or a heterosexual identity excludes homosexuality? I wouldn’t.
In another part of my thesis I argued for the recognition of “heterosexuality as a political institution,” a construction that continuously is reinforced by stereotypical ideas in society and gender performativity. A “heterosexual” view doesn’t refer to the actual sexuality of spectators, but to unconscious stereotypical ideas on homosexuality and heterosexuality.

“This implicit recognition that the lesbian gaze does not operate alone nor outside of the social context, allows us to think about a variety of lesbian viewing positions (all of which may be occupied within the viewing experience of any one woman). In other words, the discussion of the lesbian gaze denotes a shifting spectatorship that can include both what we have characterized as a paradigmatically lesbian position (open, but not exclusive to, women coded as heterosexual) and, although I hesitate to use the word ‘actual’, a self-consciously, self-identified, lesbian viewing position (occupied by women conscious of themselves and others as lesbian).” (Lewis and Rolley, 1996, p.183)

In the article Ad(dressing) the dyke, lesbian looks and lesbian looking the authors take a closer look how women look at the representation of women —in this case— in fashion photography. In photography and film there is a literal “gaze” of the photographer or filmmaker. The identification of the viewer with the represented identity evokes a desire to be somebody else. I have explicitly named this desire “lesbian.” But what does “lesbian” mean?

“Psychoanalytic accounts see lesbianism as a process of desire for the same (implicit in the label of narcissistic) that does not allow for the differences between lesbians. Indeed, if we follow Judith Butler’s lead (Butler 1990) in thinking about sex and gender as ambiguous and performative, then, we can move beyond a polarized position that sees female transvestism as the temporary assumption of a male positionality. The transvestite denotes a gender that is ambiguous, being irreducible to either male or female. This means not only that the female viewer may look as a lesbian whether or not she actually is/considers herself to be lesbian, but that the self-identified lesbian viewer may look from a variety of borrowed and invented positionalities too.” (Lewis and Rolley, 1996, p.183)

4.4

One day you appeared in my drawings. Well, it was her drawings, and not mine. Suzanne is the artist, here. Anyway, I had been drawing the view from my living room —a Gothic church— for at least half a year, before you appeared. I had been drawing, smudging and ruining fairly good drawings. Running out of blue paint all the time, because I loved blue sky’s and cheating on the proportions of the church. I had been waking up in the middle of the night to check if it was still there, wishing it goodnight, and listening to its experiences during the renovation of its roof. I had been imagining what the best spot for birds was to sit, and sometimes I had been amazed how the lights during a night mass could turn the church into a UFO bound to take off.
I had been thinking of you, I think. Yes, I had been doing that sometimes while drawing.

Being in my drawing, you could not talk with me. We wrote each other letters. I wrote you short stories and you wrote me poems in French that I loved merely because of the fact they were in French. I got romantic about it. I wanted to.

***

We met on the Internet. Your profile said you were a storyteller. I asked you for a story.
I liked our dialogue, because we started to live the story. It was the first time I understood how exciting “chatting” could be. It turned out I was living next to the church you had been drawing for a while. I feel uncomfortable with coincidences like these.

We needed to meet. We couldn’t not. We couldn’t be satisfied by language only.
Nothing happened. We didn’t even become friends. That’s fine. I am happy with the fantastic conversation we had on the Internet. I am still in love with this person you created for me.
Sometimes I imagine you up there in your room drawing the church, and me citing you a poem on top of my roof, though I know you moved to another city a couple of months ago.

***

The moment when I visited you in the drawing, I immediately realized you were not the person I desired. I fell in love with you anyway, and we have been living together for a couple of years now. In the end, it is always unpredictable whom one gets involved with.

List of references.

Armstrong, I. (2000), The Radical Aesthetic, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers.
Breambussche (1996), A. van den, Denken over kunst, een kennismaking met de kunstfilosofie, Bussum, Coutinho.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Thinking Gender, New York & London, Routledge.
Danto, A.C. (2000), ‘Marcel Duchamp en het einde van de smaak, Een apologie van de moderne kunst’ in Nexus 27.
Haraway, D.J. (1991a) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge (pp. 149-181).
Haraway, D.J. (1991b) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and Privilege of Partial Perspective’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge (pp. 183-201).
Lewis, R. and Rolley, K. ‘Ad(dressing) the dyke, Lesbian looks and lesbian looking’ in Horne, P. and Lewis, R. (1996) Outlooks, Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, London/New York, Routledge (pp. 178-190).
Rich, A. ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ in Abelove, H. and Aina, M. and Halperin, D.M. (1993) The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, London/New York, Routledge (pp.227-254).
Rossenberg, S.E. van (2001), John Cage, Uitvinder van nieuwe methoden.
Silverman, K. (1992) Male Subjectivity at the Margins, London/New York, Routledge.
Visscher, J. de (1978), Over schoonheid, Ontledingsleer van het Schone, Immanuel Kant, Meppel/Amsterdam, Boom.
Woolf, V. (1981), A Room Of One’s Own, New York/London, Harvest/HBJ.

“Fantasy also passes for reality at the level of the unconscious because it is propelled by desire for the foreclosed real. Although this desire, which is born with language, is fundamentally ‘a desire for nothing,’ fantasy defines it as desire for something.” (Silverman, 1992, p.20)

In drawing and painting a “lesbian” view —that doesn’t exist— in order to deconstruct a “heterosexual” gaze —which cannot be defined— I am working within utopian thoughts. I am finding out that my desire to draw not only consists of the desire to write new stories (drawing, painting or writing) that will replace older stories, but it is also the desire to transform my own subjectivity. This is what I would call a science-fictional element in my stories.

 

Suzanne van Rossenberg ©2004