Art Subjects, not Objects

To say objectivity is a myth is no longer a radical statement. Long taken to be the default, the perspective of the (middle class, white) male has come under a lot of criticism. Nevertheless, women continue to be treated as objects. When they are permitted to become subjects, their narratives are often still centered around men.

Women like Sophie Calle and Lauren Elkin explore the idea of women as observers, or subjects. Lauren Elkin, in her book Flâneuse, makes the case that women wanderers have offered incredible insight into society, and have used urban exploration as a launching point for greater social campaigns. Sophie Calle (who I first learned about in Elkin’s book) famously has followed men around, writing intimate details of their lives, collecting her observations in photographs and essays. In their work, women are the subjects.

I love both of their work, but there’s something about it that I’m not satisfied with. I think it’s that it feels reactionary. They are trying so hard to prove something about women, that it almost feels like they’re saying “Look, here is a woman observing things!” In which case, the woman once again becomes an object (the woman as subject as object).

This was what really dissatisfied me about Sophia Coppola’s newest film The Beguiled. Although technically beautiful, coming across as both impossibly lush and suffocatingly austere, the film left me disappointed overall. To me, it felt like even though there was one man in the movie, he was the one whose gaze it was shot through. The women in The Beguiled see themselves as women being seen by this man. Thus, in the end, the center of the action is still actually the man.

I didn’t really know how to articulate the above frustrations until I saw a piece in The New Yorker about Isabelle Mège. Mège was a medical secretary in Paris when she began writing to photographers whose work she admired asking them to take her picture. You can read the details here, but what really struck me was that she alone, of all the women artists I have seen, seemed to truly invert the object/subject paradigm. Even though she was the object of the photographers, she controlled everything in the end.

The journal Another Gaze recently published an essay by Helen Charman on the woman as a subject in film, and how it’s impossible to pretend that women can be subjects in the way we consider the default man to be. In some narratives, like The Beguiled, women’s lives continue to revolve around men even if they are nominally in control. In the Another Gaze essay, the concept of female freedom is interrogated, as a women cannot be truly free in the city when she always risks becoming an object again. According to Charman, “a life of one’s one” is nearly impossible, and a woman cannot truly escape from being a woman.

The photographers who shot Mège, interviewed in the article, don’t seem to know what to make of her. They speak of her in terms of mystery. On photographer admits that none of them know what she made with these photographs. No one knows exactly what she has made, except for her. The New Yorker claims outright, “She was never made an art object.” She was the one doing the making.

She controls the rights to the images. She controls who shoots her, and how. And she gives nothing of herself to the photographer–absolutely nothing. Looking at the photographs, it seems to me that the male gaze is all but absent. She doesn’t see herself as a woman being looked at by a man. She seems not to care about the men–indeed, to barely notice them, as though they are so insignificant they might as well not be there at all. Although many of her photographs are nude, they are not sexy, and they are not particularly beautiful. They reveal something, but what that something is is I think unknowable, except to Mège herself.

I’m sure there are other artists who are meaningfully exploring women as subjects. I would like to know all of them, but I can claim to know barely any. Regardless of how many exist, exactly, they are few.

Objectivity, of course, is not a realistic. However, creating narratives of women that don’t rely on men in any way is an achievable goal, and one that I hope we can creatively address in the future.

 

The Price of Beauty: Paris and Tokyo

Paris stunned me.

Before I arrived, I had planned to explore the banlieu, the immigrant communities, the parts of Paris that we don’t think of when we think Paris, city of lights. I wanted to see the parts of Paris my high school French teacher taught us about, where average people lived and mundane life happened the way it does in any other city in the world. I wanted to see past the glory of Paris and into the quotidian.

I did do some exploring, but I’m embarrassed to say I stuck very close to the center of the city most of the time. In particular, the Pantheon drew me back day after day. I reconfigured whatever route I was walking so I could swing past it, so I could get a glimpse through curved stone alleys.

Paris is the most beautiful city I’ve ever been to. There was no an ugly inch of it, even in the neighborhoods considered to be less “fashionable”. And it was more than humbling to walk across bridges, past walls, around buildings that were older than America.

I had a similar sense of awe when living in China, when I would jog around my university’s campus, as it used to be the site of the Qing dynasty. The trees had borne witness to some of the biggest upheavals in modern human history, and they were still there to bear witness to me and other joggers, to the students who sat around between classes, to the people from all over the world who came to Tsinghua.

But the thing about Paris, I realized a few days into my trip, was that it has the most visible history. Everything looks old. Elegant, but ancient. I don’t think I saw a single building made of glass (though again, the places I went were limited). Contrast Paris to London, and the cities speak to very different historical experiences. In London, greatly damaged in World War II, the historical crouches alongside the towering glass superstructures, the icons of the 21st century.

Thinking about Tokyo, too, there’s so much to understand about the different experiences specifically in World War II between France and Japan.

Between London, Paris, and Tokyo, I was reading Lauren Elkin’s very inspiring, challenging book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. I loved the way she wrote about Paris, but her description of Tokyo made me indignant the way a person gets when someone insults their siblings or parents. It’s okay if I say that, but not you.

The thing I objected to most was when she called Tokyo ugly. When she said it was unwalkable. When the parts she did come to love are some of the most boring parts of the city.

And Elkin had a lot going on when she lived here. She was gracious to Tokyo and honest with herself in the book when she talked about some of the deeper reasons she wasn’t happy here. And yes, she did live in one of the ugliest parts of the city (Roppongi; a place I will not go to even under duress).

But there were two things her book made me think of in connection to Paris, which she unfavorably compared Tokyo to.

First, Tokyo is beautiful in a way that Paris is not, and vice versa. It’s a given that a different country will have a different conception of beauty. Japan does not, has never, made stone monuments to anything. Important landmarks are either literally just nature–Mt. Fuji, for example–or are made of wood. Things aren’t built to last, because “lasting” is not a part of beauty here. So if you look with a Paris lens on Tokyo, sure, it’s not so pretty. But if you look at it in the context of Japanese beauty… okay, it’s not always pretty. But there’s a grace in its impermanence that other cities don’t have.

Tokyo is also beautiful in very, very small ways–the ways the addresses are ordered concentrically, which is interesting and gives you a much richer variety in wanderings than a grid city like New York. There are also beautiful gardens in people’s homes, lovely small neighborhood parks, and the smallest shrines in the most random places. There is something beautiful if you throw away your expectations and look carefully.

Second, Tokyo is not beautiful the way Paris is beautiful because it didn’t survive the war the way Paris survived the war. France surrendered quickly, and the Parisians (except for the Resistance, of course) famously collaborated with the Nazis. Paris also wasn’t a strategic location, so the Nazis felt no particular need to raze it the way they did other European cities. Paris is beautiful because it was spared destruction, by accident, luck, and some shameful decisions by some shameful people.

Tokyo was destroyed. Looking at pictures of my school from World War II, the area is unrecognizable. Other Japanese cities were nearly removed from the map completely.

I laughed a little when I was out walking today because Elkin described the houses and apartments as looking like they were covered in bathroom tiles. She’s not wrong. Many of these houses also have little pointed faux-Japanese roofs, which is particularly interesting as you would think there wouldn’t be a need for faux-Japanese styles in Japan. But most houses do not predate the war, and were built quickly the way Levitt Town was in America to accomodate the post-war population. Most buildings are not older than America. Many places were burned to the ground by America.

And after World War II as well, Tokyo and Paris had such different histories. Tokyo was occupied by a conquering army. Paris was liberated. Paris was able to take pride in its landmarks and history again. Tokyo was forbidden from doing so, and had to remake itself to fit in with the new global order. When you consider how ugly–aesthetically and politically–the new global order is, it’s not such a surprise that Tokyo’s architecture adapted accordingly.

Paris could afford to glorify itself, can still afford to do so. Tokyo tries desperately to be taken seriously by the west, remaking itself again and again as if just a nip here, a tuck there, a disruption of urban fabric for the Olympics over there, will make it attractive enough for the rest of the world.  Not beautiful–attractive.

I do think ultimately I would prefer to be in Paris long term than Tokyo. But that isn’t because Tokyo is such a hostile place, aesthetically or otherwise. I was taken in by Paris from the minute I walked out of the Gare du Nord and saw those gorgeous cake slices of buildings stretching in every direction. But I want to be conscious of the fact that beauty comes at a price, and that’s a price that not every city in the world can afford. Often when we talk of beauty of cities, it’s a discussion that privileges the west, the old seats of empires, the places who have an unchallenged place in the global hierarchy.

Even if a city like Tokyo, or Osaka, or Beijing, or Taipei, is not really to your personal taste, it’s important to understand why these places are the way they are, why our places are the way they are. If we understand the places, we understand the people, and we understand ourselves ultimately. Agnes Varda said our environments inhabit us, and I would add that the us-containing environments inhabit history as well.