The Gaze Unconsidered

Some years ago, a team of scientists at Harvard University – half of whom were women – decided to explore the neurological roots of dyslexia. As with some scientific studies, their research led them not to a greater understanding of the problem posed but to an unintended discovery that would have far-reaching consequences for our society:

They learned that men and women think differently.

This might come as no surprise to any sentient being that has spent even one minute listening to a husband and wife in conversation. I mean, the family dog knows this. But the findings sent shock waves through a post-feminist community that had been raised on the notion that the biological differences between men and women had nothing to do with their brains. What the Harvard study showed – in vivid imagery on the front page of The New York Times – was that thinking in the male brain was often confined to the left frontal lobe, the seat of verbal functions, so-called Broca’s brain. Whereas when women thought, both hemispheres of the brain lit up like a pinball machine. 

What was believed to be the “fairer sex’s” scatterbrained nature was really an ability to process seemingly unrelated ideas simultaneously rather than in a linear, male fashion.

I was reminded of this while plunging into the catalog for “The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991,” which opens at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art Jan. 15.

Sarah Charlesworth
"Figures" from Objects of Desire I, 1983-84
Cibachrome with lacquered wood frame

The show debunks the idea that women and men in that feminist and post-feminist period had the same agenda when it came to deconstructing – or analyzing – the roles that the media and capitalism play in controlling visual culture and attaining and retaining power. Women had their own path to walk, one that had in a sense been forged for them not only by the media and the marketplace but by the prejudices of male power. By its very nature, the exhibit raises a question that has haunted me as it does some artists and visual arts critics: Do women see the way men see? In particular: Do they see their own and the opposite sex the way men do?

Clearly, these are questions that tantalize some of the 22 artists who’ve contributed 68 photographs, prints, paintings, videos and installations to “The Deconstructive Impulse.” Among these is Barbara Bloom, who’s represented by several fascinating Cibachrome prints from her 1980s series “The Gaze,” which deals with the viewer looking at people who are in turn looking at something else. And since we are seeing these images through the photographer’s lens, through Bloom’s perspective, we are in effect looking at her looking at them.

What does all this looking tell us? It suggests that women do indeed see things differently, particularly when it comes to the male or the female as sex object. The three sea nymphs in “Three Girls” (1987) – a photograph of a photograph – stand together looking out to the sea, their topless backs to the camera. The emphasis is not on their toplessness but their communality. The nude figure in “Tango (Male Nude Study)” (1985) – cropped and seen from the back – could be male or female. And anyway, it’s about the figure in relationship to a shadowy other party. In the ironic “Blue Dahlem Curtain,” (1986), the titular curtain is but a backdrop for a barely glimpsed marble sculpture whose dynamic drapery puts the curtain to shame. 

There’s a subtlety and focus on relationships here that you don’t necessarily get in male explorations of the nude. That’s apparent in Bloom’s “Ingres Girl Viewers” (1987), which captures three women contemplating a study for Ingres’ “Grand Odalisque.”  It’s one of art history’s most famous – and famously provocative – nudes, with the turbaned subject gazing matter-of-factly over the elongated back she presents to the viewer. And yet by Bloom snapping her living subjects off to one side, she makes it seem as if the woman in the painting is engaging them.

Not all of the reasons for the differences in men’s and women’s perspectives are biological, of course. They also have to do with centuries of conditioning. In her brilliant photomontage “Cleaning the Drapes” from her “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful” (1967-72), Martha Rosler fuses themes of the gender and racial divide in an image of an Asian-looking woman vacuuming drapes that part to reveal the Vietnam War.

Here Rosler underscores both the notion that Vietnam was the first living-room war and the cultural/racial gulf between the Vietnamese and the Americans that proved key in that disastrous enterprise. But she’s also exploring the roles that have framed and frozen women and men. The modern, portable vacuum, with its shoulder strap and long attachments, is meant to be the female equivalent of the soldier’s rifles. The home is her battleground and boardroom in an era when other arenas were just opening up to her.

The women in “The Deconstructive Impulse” demonstrate that they were not about to be limited in the arena of the imagination, however. In “Before and Happily Ever After,” a 1991 oil and acrylic, Deborah Kass tweaks the fairy tale stereotype of the pert-nosed princess and the hooked-nosed crone who’s usually the villain – at least in male Hollywood. 

By making the princess the Before picture and the crone the After, what Kass is saying is that if a girl is lucky she’ll live to become the wise old crone.

In the gestalt of the female brain and gaze, they’re really one.

“The Deconstructive Impulse:  Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991” is at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art Jan. 15- April 3 . Hours are noon-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun.. Admission is $5; $3 for senior citizens and students with ID. The college is off Anderson Hill Road between Purchase and King streets. 251-6100,  neuberger.org