A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  These weird beings remind me of my presleep visions and of my vivid dreams, when one grotesque face and body blends into another, when one sex becomes another in the brilliant carnival of altered consciousness.

  The women from this series are far fiercer than those that came before or after. Look at the goony grinning person of The Visit with her legs open. You can almost hear her giggling, but she does not inspire fear, awe, or shock. Woman II is potent, fertile, and potentially violent.

  Julia Kristeva wrote, “One of the most accurate representations of creation, that is, of artistic practice, is the series of paintings by de Kooning entitled Women: savage, explosive, funny and inaccessible creatures in spite of the fact that they have been massacred by the artist. But what if they had been created by a woman? Obviously she would have had to deal with her own mother, and therefore with herself, which is a lot less funny.”24

  Kristeva acknowledges the power of de Kooning’s works and wonders what would have happened if a woman had painted them. A woman, she claims, would have to identify with the woman as her mother and as herself. Does this identification become a kind of mourning that prevents comedy? Must we say, She is I or she is not I? Either/or? The mother is powerful and, in her power, frightening for all infants—male or female. Every child must separate from its mother. But boys can use their difference to pull away from that dependence in a way girls often can’t. For Kristeva, sexual identification complicates de Kooning’s images.

  In their biography of de Kooning, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan describe the artist’s last meeting with his mother in Amsterdam, not long before she died. He described his mother as “a trembling little old bird.” And then, after he had left her, he said, “That’s the person I feared most in the world.”25 Cornelia Lassooy beat her son when he was a child.

  We were all inside our mothers’ bodies once. We were all infants once, and then our mothers were huge. We suckled milk from their breasts. We don’t remember any of it, but our motor-sensory, emotional-perceptual learning begins long before our conscious memories. It begins even before birth, and we are shaped by it, and then by the myriad symbolic associations that come with language and culture and a gendered life that cuts the world in half and inscribes a border between us, as if we were more different than the same.

  I don’t know how to tell a single story about these fantasy women, these loved and hated and irritating and frightening figments on canvas. I can only make a fragmented argument. But then, every story and every argument is partial. So much is always missing. I know that as an artist, I resist every suffocating categorical box that divides content and form, emotion and reason, body and mind, woman and man, as well as every narrative that turns art into a history of epic masculine rivalries. We are all creatures of these deep chasms and choking myths, and Picasso’s, Beckmann’s, and de Kooning’s imaginary beings partake of them as well. But with paintings, when you look hard and keep looking, every once in a while you may begin to suffer a feeling of vertigo, and that is a sign that the world may be turning upside down.

  Balloon Magic

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  ON November 12, 2013, an anonymous person bought Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) for $58.4 million at a Christie’s auction. The twelve-foot stainless steel sculpture looks like the balloons twisted into animal shapes by clowns hired for children’s birthday parties, only much bigger and harder. I will confess at the outset of this essay that if I had many millions of dollars to spend, I would buy art, including work by living artists (both famous and obscure), but I wouldn’t purchase a Koons, not because the work has no interest for me—it does—but because I don’t think I would want to live with his art. The experience of art is always a dynamic relation between the viewer and the thing seen. My dialogue with Koons’s work is not lively enough to sustain a long relationship. Anonymous, however, for reasons we cannot know and can only guess at, felt the money was well spent.

  The value of a work of visual art today has nothing to do with the cost of its materials, nor does its price reflect the time of an artist’s labor—whether the work was created over the course of a year or dashed off in a few moments. Jeff Koons has all of his work fabricated by others, people he no doubt pays well for their expertise. Buying art is not like buying a car or a handbag, however inflated the price of those goods may be. The money paid for a painting, sculpture, or installation is determined by how the work is perceived in the context of a particular buyer’s world. And perception is a complex phenomenon. Our brains are not cameras or recording devices. Visual perception is active and shaped by both conscious and unconscious forces. Expectation is crucial to perceptual experience, and what to expect about how the world works is learned, and once something is learned well, it becomes unconscious.

  Even people with little interest in art have digested the fact that the name “Rembrandt” is a signifier of artistic greatness. If a museum discovers that its Rembrandt painting is, in fact, not by Rembrandt but by a follower or cohort of the master, the value of the picture plummets. The thing itself remains the same. What has changed is its contextual status, which is not objectively measurable but rather an atmospheric quality produced by the object in the mind of the viewer. The curators may send the canvas to the basement or let it hang with its new attribution. The viewer—let us call him Mr. Y—who once stared at the work with admiration begins to see its inferiority to a “real” Rembrandt. Mr. Y is neither a hypocrite nor a buffoon. Even though the painting has not been altered, Mr. Y’s apprehension of the canvas has. The picture is missing a crucial, if fictional, component: the enchantment of greatness.

  In a widely publicized experiment, the neuro-economist Hilke Plassmann at Caltech discovered (or rather rediscovered) that the same wine tastes better when the price tag reads ninety dollars rather than ten dollars. “Price makes us feel a wine tastes better,” Plassmann explains, “but that’s a cognitive bias that arises from computations in the brain that tell me to expect it to be better, and then shape my experience so that it does, indeed, taste better.” Plassmann’s experiment involved fMRI scans of her subjects’ brains. Although her explanation is at once reductive and crude—no psychological state, including bias, can be neatly reduced to “brain computations,” nor are neural networks in a position to “tell” anyone anything. The brain is not a speaking subject. Our Mr. Y is a subject. Mr. Y’s brain is an organ in his body crucially involved in, but not sufficient to, his perceptual experience. Nevertheless, the larger point that may be extrapolated from Plassmann’s experiment and countless others, which often remains unsaid, is instructive: There is no pure sensation of anything, not in feeling pain, not in tasting wine, and not in looking at art. All of our perceptions are contextually coded, and that contextual coding does not remain outside us in the environment but becomes a psycho-physiological reality within us, which is why a famous name attached to a painting literally makes it look better.

  The famous name “Jeff Koons” is not a signifier of greatness, certainly not yet, but rather of art celebrity and of money itself. Money, after all, is a fiction founded on a collective agreement through which exchanges are made possible in the world. Paper or plastic bills have no inherent worth: we simply agree that they do. The large orange dog may serve Anonymous as a gleaming talisman of his own wealth and power. When he looks at its reflective surface, he literally sees himself. (My assumption is that Anonymous is a man. In this, I could, of course, be wrong, but men who pay astronomical prices for art outnumber women.) Koons, who was a commodities broker on Wall Street for six years, is well versed in the fact that belief and rumor fuel speculation in the market and push prices skyward. In the art world, “buzz” and the media generated by it kick-start speculative buying. In an interview, Koons said, “I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based on it.” As with many of Koons’s statements, this one is obscure, if not oxymoronic. How can a personal life be based on advertisement and media? Wouldn’t that by
definition make it impersonal? Perhaps Koons is acknowledging he is a celebrity and therefore lives a good deal of his life as a third-person character, Jeff Koons: he himself is a commodity traded on the art market.

  Anonymous paid $58.4 million not just for Balloon Dog, the object, but for an object that carries with it the Koons celebrity mythos, the audacious bad-boy, super-rich artist-entrepreneur of the moment, whose often sumptuous work celebrates the banal and the kitsch with blockbuster appeal, an art-world version of an American aesthetic familiar from Hollywood and Las Vegas extravaganzas, the gaudy delights of Esther Williams and Liberace boiled down to a thing. It is not surprising that one of Koons’s best-known works is a ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee.

  The person who buys hugely expensive art always indulges in a fantasy of personal enhancement. The collector who buys Gerhard Richter, another wildly expensive living artist (whose work I love and have written about), may pay vast amounts for reasons similar to the ones that prompted Anonymous to bid for Dog. In his chapter on the self in Principles of Psychology (1890), William James writes, “In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down,—not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.”

  The boundaries of the self (or a form of the self) expand in ownership, and this may explain, at least in part, why art by men is more expensive than art by women. It is not only the fact that most collectors are men. There are many important women in the art world who run galleries, for example, and they also show mostly male artists. In New York City during the last ten years, around 80 percent of all solo shows have been by men. When self-enhancement through art objects is at stake, a largely unconscious bias, not unlike the one hidden in the wine sippers, is at work when it comes to art made by a woman. The highest price paid for a work by a post–Second World War artist was for a Rothko canvas—$86.9 million, which is far more than the highest price paid for a woman (a Louise Bourgeois spider was sold for $10.7 million). The taint of the feminine and its myriad metaphorical associations affect all art, not just visual art. Little, soft, weak, emotional, sensitive, domestic, and passive are opposed to the masculine qualities big, hard, strong, cerebral, tough, public, and aggressive. There are many men with the former qualities and many women with the latter, and most of us are blends of both.

  The attributes associated with the two sexes are culturally determined, often registered in us subliminally rather than consciously, and they squeeze and denigrate women far more than men. Indeed, both Rothko and Bourgeois were highly sensitive, troubled, emotional, egotistical people whose characters mingled both classically feminine and masculine qualities. Of the two, Bourgeois was clearly the stronger and, according to the adjectival lists mentioned above, the more “masculine” personality. Rothko killed himself; Bourgeois fought on, working furiously (in all senses of the word) until she died at age ninety-eight. But even in terms of their work, it is hard to characterize either one as masculine or feminine. I think Bourgeois is the greater artist, more innovative, more intelligent, more forceful, and, in the long run, a better investment than either Koons or Rothko. (My opinion.)

  In his acerbic and astute 1984 essay “Art and Money,” the late Robert Hughes wrote about the cost of art after 1960, the soaring prices of that moment, and the confidence needed for their continuing ascent. “This confidence feeds and is fed by a huge and complicated root-system in scholarship, criticism, journalism, PR, and museum policy. And it cannot be allowed to falter or lapse, because of the inherently irrational nature of art as a commodity.” Hughes’s essay was prescient: “Nobody of intelligence in the art world believes this boom can go on forever.” It didn’t. The stock market crash of 1987 would have a delayed effect on the art market, which tanked in 1990. Up one day, down the next. So is enthusiastic investing in art similar to tulip mania or dot-com hysteria or the gleeful no-end-to-easy-money that predated the 2008 crash? Yes and no. If an artwork is merely an object bought in the hope that its price will rise so that it can be turned around to huge profit, then the thing is no different from a pork belly bought and sold on the futures market. The investor’s connection to pork bellies is one of winning and losing, of fattening himself or herself with more money. The dead hog’s body part is a pure and abstract commodity; the lives of the pigs involved play no role whatsoever in the gamble.

  What distinguishes an artwork from a pork belly is not only that the former’s value is entirely arbitrary. It is that whatever its price in dollars or pounds or yuan, the thing that hangs on the wall or stands on the floor or is mounted from the ceiling holds within it the traces of one living human being’s intentional creative act for another, seen in the tracks of a brushstroke, in the witty juxtapositions of objects or forms, or in a complex idea or emotion represented in one way or another. Art isn’t dead the way a chair or pork belly is dead. It is enlivened and animated in the relation between the spectator and the work. The extraordinary experiences I have had looking at works of art—old, new, priceless, expensive, and downright cheap—have always taken the form of animated internal dialogues between me and them.

  If one day Balloon Dog’s value bursts and shrivels in a Koons crash, we can only hope that Anonymous has an ongoing relationship with his orange pooch that can sustain the inevitable inflations and deflations of all speculative markets. In fact, a balloon serves as a nice metaphor for the lessons of history: you blow and you blow and you blow, and the thing gets larger and larger and larger still, and in your excitement you forget the laws of physics, and you begin to believe that your balloon is like no other balloon in the world—there is no limit to its size. And then, it pops.

  My Louise Bourgeois

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  WHEN Emily Dickinson read about the death of George Eliot in the newspaper, she wrote the following sentence in a letter to her cousins: “The look of the words as they lay in the print I shall never forget. Not their face in the casket could have had the eternity to me. Now, my George Eliot.” In 1985, the American poet Susan Howe published My Emily Dickinson, a book of remarkable scholarship, insight, and wit that called upon Dickinson’s personal tribute to Eliot for its title. I am continuing this tradition of ownership by using the first-person possessive pronoun to claim another great artist, Louise Bourgeois, as mine. She is, of course, also your Louise Bourgeois. But that is my point. My L.B. and yours may well be relatives, but it is unlikely they are identical twins.

  I have long argued that the experience of art is made only in the encounter between spectator and art object. The perceptual experience of art is literally embodied by and in the viewer. We are not the passive recipients of some factual external reality but rather actively creating what we see through the established patterns of the past, learned patterns so automatic they have become unconscious. In other words, we bring ourselves with our pasts to artworks, selves and pasts, which include not just our sensitivity and brilliance but our biases and blind spots as well. The objective qualities of a work—for example, Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), made of marble, mirrors, steel, and glass—come to life in the viewer’s eyes, but that vision is also a form of memory, of well-established perceptual habits. There is no perception without memory. But good art surprises us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.

  I have further insisted that we do not treat artworks the way we treat forks or chairs. As soon as a fork or chair or mirror is imported into a work of art, it is qualitatively different from the fork in your drawer or the chair in your living room or the mirror in your bathroom because it carries the traces of a living consciousness and unconsciousness, and it
is invested with that being’s vitality. A work of art is always part person. Therefore the experience of art is interpersonal or intersubjective. In art, the relation established is between a person and a part-person-part-thing. It is never between a person and just a thing. It is the aliveness we give to art that allows us to make powerful emotional attachments to it.

  My Louise Bourgeois is not just what I make of her works, not just my own analyses of their sinuous, burgeoning meanings, but rather the Louise Bourgeois who is now part of my bodily self in memory, both conscious and unconscious, who in turn has mutated into the forms of my own work, part of the strange transference that takes place between artists. I borrow the psychoanalytic word “transference” because Bourgeois would have understood it. Psychoanalysis not only fascinated her as a discipline, it became a way of life. She began her psychoanalysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld in New York in 1953. It ended with his death in 1985. In 1993, she denied her analysis in an interview.

  “Have you been in analysis yourself?”

  “No,” answers L.B., “but I have spent a lifetime in self-improvement—self-analysis, which is the same thing.”

  In the transference, the analyst takes on the guise of an important other for the patient—usually the first beloveds, the parents. For L.B., it would have been mother, father, and siblings, all characters in the childhood drama she offered up to us in her writing, writing that is part of my Louise Bourgeois. She is a marvelous writer, a writer of sharp, lucid observations about life and art. Her art itself, however, both displaced and replaced her life story.