Currently on view at Barbican Art Gallery in London is “Masculinities: Liberation through Photography”, an exhibition documenting how masculinity is “experienced, performed, coded, and socially constructed as expressed and documented through” (Barbican) photographs and films by 50 artists. Highly influential artists such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Catherine Opie join younger artists such as Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas, Sam Contis, and Marianne Wex in this major exhibition. I was initially surprised to hear about this show. An oft excluded subject from constructive conversations about gender, the idea of a major show dealing with the contradiction and complexity of masculinity is intriguing.
Catherine Opie, one of the artists featured in the show, is a contemporary American photographer that investigates the relationship between individuals and the spaces they occupy. By implementing a variety of image techniques, and pulling from genres such as portraiture, landscape, and studio photography, Opie has contemporized portraits of American society and culture. Her seminal work, “Being and Having” (1991) is featured in Barbican’s exhibition. This series of photographs shows some of her close friends in the LGBTQ+ community wearing “stereotypically masculine” accessories such as fake mustaches and tattoos.
While trying to further research Opie’s “Being and Having” and gauge critical response to her work, I stumbled upon this thesis written by Anamaria Ramey, MA Art history student at University of California Riverside, in 2014. Entitled “Portrait Paradox: Complicating Identity in Catherine Opie’s “Being and Having, Ramey argues that subversive portraiture techniques by Opie promote protean understandings of gender in a complex and dynamic commentary upon the construction of gender, systems of power, and the personal and political. Here I want to briefly begin an examination Ramey’s claims, engage them with the works of Opie and speak to the broader theme of masculinity.
Ramey introduces Opie’s “Being and Having” by first analyzing the meaning of ‘being’ and ‘having’. By linking psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s The Signification of the Phallus to an idea of ‘being’ [the phallus] and ‘having’ [the phallus], a broader connection to Lancanian theory is able to be drawn between Opie’s project and gender/ sexuality theory. Lacan’s use of the word phallus is complex and enigmatic. Trying to decipher his original publication in The Signification of the Phallus was difficult. But there is a general framework in which Lacan uses “phallus” and it is framed around the idea of desire, and how it complicates the bond between mother and child. Lacan insists that within the relationship between mother and child, there is always a third term (beyond that of the child), that the aim of the mother’s desire: the phallus. The phallus as the “Imaginary object of the mother’s desire which remains outside of the child’s reach, something it can neither grasp nor bring into being, something quite ‘other’ than it” (Hook 70), alludes to the Lacanian Oedipus complex–in which there is a discrepancy between the mother’s desire for the imaginary phallus and the child not having it. Lacan argues that at the time the child realizes that “the father ‘has’ the phallus, that he possesses the phallic signifier” (Hook 76), there is a simultaneous realization that the child “can no longer directly materialize the phallus for the mother; it must now give up the idea of the phallus as an Imaginary object and position itself in a relation to the phallus in its Symbolic dimension as the phallic signifier that will determine sexual identity” (Hook 76).
A wave of postmodern feminist and queer theorists have since critiqued psychoanalysis and Lacan’s theory, Ramey argues; Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” among them. Among Butler’s critiques are the limitations of the binary model and the normative understandings of gender and sexuality (cisnormative heterosexuality) that Lacan upholds with his claims. Butler’s criticisms of this binary of “being” and “having” are seemingly similarly challenged with the title of Opie’s series. To subvert what it means to “be” and to “have” [in Lacanian terms, a phallus], is presumably the aim of Opie’s work. Her representation of non traditional, queer masculinities on a diverse array of bodies is a testament to this challenge.
Through “Being and Having”, a serial style of portraiture (in an almost head-shot style) offers a highly personal way of viewing masculinity, in particular female masculinity. There is a repeated representation of lesbian women, and reference made to stereotypical presentations of Latino masculinity and butch lesbian appearance. The concept of ‘female masculinity’, and its relationship to Opie’s series, is what I perhaps find most compelling about the portraits that make up “Being and Having”. Our class discussions of Halberstam’s “Female Masculinity” helped to frame female masculinity as a non hegemonic femininity. Opie is simultaneously preoccupied with documenting this alternative modes of masculinity (ie, female masculinity), as seen through the queer community. In a very literal sense, Opie’s “Being and Having” directly gives representation and serves as an affirmation that these feminine masculinities do exist.
However, an additional layer of nuance present in Opie’s work is the use of fake mustaches and an almost overexaggerated performativity about the portraits: they feel staged. And yet, there is a degree to which they aren’t easily translatable. By using an intimate portrait, Opie wants the viewer to examine the person photographed. But, at the same time, Opie aims to challenge the ways in which the viewer can easily observe and interpret the subject of the piece. Certain features and accessories may easily read as false, while others are hard to interpret. There is a certain ambiguity about the portraits that make them ever the more powerful, and further revealing of Butler’s theory of gender performativity theory and of the ways in which masculinity is constructed and coded.
Sources:
Ramey, A. C. (2014). Portrait Paradox: Complicating Identity in Catherine Opie’s “Being and Having”. UC Riverside. ProQuest ID: Ramey_ucr_0032N_11770. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5v99p6m. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tf6v1xq
https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/masculinities-liberation-through-photography
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/960/1/Lacanthemeaning.pdf: Hook, Derek (2006). Lacan, the meaning of the phallus and the ‘sexed’ subject [online]. London: LSE Research Online.
Leave a Reply