by Olivia Laing
Reich’s father Leo was a jealous man. By the time Reich was twelve, Leo had become convinced his wife was having an affair, though he didn’t know with whom. One evening, he saw her standing alone with the tutor. He dragged her upstairs and accused her of being a whore. From his own room, Reich could hear ‘only (!) the sound of someone being pushed around and landing on the bed’, followed by his father’s voice, full of rage, threatening to kill her. Moments later, his father burst in and made Reich confess to what he’d seen. This fraught conversation was interrupted by a ‘deep groan’ from the bedroom. Cecilia had swallowed Lysol and was writhing on her bed.
Leo saved her life by forcing an emetic down her throat, but for the next year he subjected her to vicious beatings, until her hands and face and body were permanently marked by his attacks. In his memoir Passion of Youth, Reich remembered ‘ghastly scenes and ever increasing violence. Mother had become completely numb and apathetically allowed the blows to rain down upon her.’ To his unending shame, he failed to protect her. Worse, he turned away from her too, even shouting at her himself (the pain of this confession always reminds me of Dworkin, who wrote of her shame that at the peak of her husband’s attacks, she kicked and beat her beloved dog). Eventually Cecilia tried to commit suicide again. This time she only managed to destroy her stomach lining. Like a character in a fairy tale, she had to take a draught of poison for a third time before she was successful, though even then it took her two days to die.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what his mother underwent drove Reich’s work as a sexual liberationist, opening his eyes to the dreadful consequences of patriarchal models of ownership as well as restrictive attitudes to sex. When he talked about the Sexual Revolution, he didn’t mean a fantasia of endless orgasms so much as a world in which women could experience sexual pleasure without fear of retribution, violence or death. It was this interest in and sympathy for women that made Reich such a touchstone in the 1970s, for feminists of many different persuasions. His ideas about politics and gender are right at the heart of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published the same year as Sexual Politics and far more radical in its demands. He’s a major and not uncontroversial figure in Juliet Mitchell’s 1974 weighty re-examination of psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women, while the eco-feminist and gender essentialist Susan Griffin drew on him for her work on pornography and rape.
Dworkin too read him avidly. In 1987, she published Intercourse, her harrowing interrogation of the sexual act in terms of power. It’s here that she describes Reich as the most optimistic of sexual liberationists, ‘the only male one to abhor rape really.’ At first glance they seem unlikely comrades, but though it isn’t easy to square Reich’s celebration of orgiastic potency with Dworkin’s scepticism around the act of heterosexual penetration, her call for men to embrace the limp dick, there is a shared bedrock to their visions. They both regard pornography and sexual violence as unnatural cultural symptoms, at once the product and enforcer of patriarchy. They both believe the family is where this ideology is instilled, training people from infancy to submit to the authority of the father. More importantly, they both retain faith in a different kind of sex, and though the details of this utopian act remain hazy they are both certain it isn’t founded in the desire to do harm, but in absolute equality.
In the 1980s, Dworkin was vocally and controversially opposed to certain kinds of sexual practice, particularly BDSM, which she regarded as a kind of Stockholm syndrome re-enactment of abuse. As with her attack on Sade, she refused or was unable to separate the imaginary from the actual. Though I find many of her arguments convincing, I must admit my own scepticism overwhelms me here. It isn’t necessary to believe there exists in each of us a pure, unsullied self to deplore the damage that the iniquitous and ineluctable structures we live inside do to our sexual imaginations. But I don’t agree, as Reich and Dworkin did, that sex is necessarily dysfunctional or expressive of misogyny just because it involves consensual acts of masochism or sadism.
Like literature, sex is a space of imaginative play, in which dangerous forces can be encountered and sampled. And like illness, sex is a descent into what Edward St Aubyn once described as ‘the darkness of the pre-verbal realm’, where uncertain ecstasies and terrors lurk. BDSM, the volitional version of the Sadeian revel, is one of the ways of getting there, a route back to the immense feelings of infancy, to the body before language intervened. It’s not, as Dworkin argues, simply and always a replication of the habits of misogyny. One only needs to leaf through Tom of Finland’s drawings to be convinced of that.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only pre-teen who took Sexual Politics off my parents’ shelf and found the opening account of a woman being fucked in a bathtub not horrifying but arousing. Wasn’t there something else going on in The Story of O too, a possibility of submitting not to male supremacy (those interchangeable dick-swinging men, so naked in their desire to be called Master) but to the body itself, its frightening, consuming realms of speechlessness? What was exciting was what Dworkin objected to most strongly: O’s pleasure at being reduced to a body, parts and a hole. Isn’t that the point of sex, to relinquish the speaking self, to be tumbled into infinity?
Not long after I read Pornography in the library at Sussex, I saw Dworkin speak at the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship in Brighton. It was 1995 and she was nearly fifty, dressed in her famous uniform of plimsolls and dungarees, ‘the ur-figure’, as Johanna Fateman puts it, ‘of so-called anti-sex feminism, a contentious term used to characterize feminist opposition to pornography, prostitution, and S&M.’ In addition to her activism against certain types of sex, she’d spearheaded a controversial attempt to pass civil rights ordinances in American cities that would allow women to sue pornographers for damages.
The mood at the conference was fractious. There were walk-outs and stand-up fights. I’d gone with a lesbian friend of my mother’s who I’d always liked, but over the course of the weekend we found we were on opposite sides of a painful gap, combatants in different armies of what were known as the porn wars. Was censorship the way to roll? Many feminists agreed with Dworkin that it was a route to liberation, but many, me included, dissented, especially after she made tactical alliances with right-wing anti-obscenity campaigners.
Angela Carter was dead by then (she died of lung cancer in 1992, at the age of fifty-one), but she too had been a dissenter. As her biographer Edmund Gordon explains in The Invention of Angela Carter: ‘Angela’s socialist consciousness meant she believed that pornography was an expression of power relations, but only in so far as everything else was, and like everything else it was capable of expressing those relations differently.’ ‘I think some of the Sisters make too much of a fuss about porn,’ she’d told The Face back in 1984. ‘They imply also that women who don’t make a fuss are in some way in complicity. I think that’s bananas.’ At the time, she was still smarting over feminist attacks on The Sadeian Woman. The paperback cover, which featured a surrealist painting by Clovis Trouille of semi-clad women being whipped, had been stickered by the British Federation of Alternative Bookshops as being offensive to women, never mind its liberatory contents.
Was pornography – the display of genitals and body parts; the description of sexual acts – really so harmful, or was anti-porn feminism reinforcing the ancient, puritanical commandment against female desire? Where was freedom situated: in the struggle for a world without sexual violence, or in the right to engage in any kind of consensual act? By the time I saw Dworkin, these questions were tearing second-wave feminism apart. She seemed a lonely, embattled figure that day, still carrying her painful message, still preaching her extreme, unfashionable solutions.
The problem, as I experienced it that afternoon, was that Dworkin made you feel bad for wanting sex at all. The problem wasn’t just that she legislated against certain strains of desire, but that s
he left no room for the possibility of arousal at all. The problem – but it was me and my erotic imagination that were apparently the problem. Though I find much of her writing electrifying now, what Dworkin made me feel then was shame.
*
I studied The Bloody Chamber for A-level, but I didn’t realise for another two and a half decades that it was an arrow fired in the same debate. Carter wrote it alongside and much more easily than The Sadeian Woman, and it was published by Gollancz in May of the same year. Though the plots are lifted from fairy tales like ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Bluebeard’, the dynamics are recognisably Sadeian in descent. She drags out the moth-eaten sets, chivvies forward the sinister old cast – the isolated chateau, the cruel marquis, the doomed and pliant ingénue – and then she disrupts the machinery, opening unexpected doors and windows everywhere.
In the title story, the pallid young bride of a serially widowed nobleman breaks into his locked chamber of horrors, only to discover her embalmed, decapitated and exsanguinated predecessors inside. ‘I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself’, she says regretfully, certain she is next, but it’s no longer true. These lost girls only submit when it pleases them to do so. They have a destiny of their own. ‘The blade did not descend, the necklace did not sever, my head did not roll.’
One of the things that makes The Bloody Chamber so invigorating is that it doesn’t shut the door on sexuality, or try to clean it up. Red Riding Hood fucks the wolf; Beauty chooses to become a Beast, her skin tongued off to reveal beautiful fur. If Dworkin could only find evidence of misogyny in fairy tales, Carter unearths the polymorphous perversity that Freud speculated formed the very earliest phase of human sexuality. Her answer to misogyny is not to refuse sex, but to transform it. You don’t have to foreclose on erotic possibility just because you’d like to leave the bedroom with your limbs intact.
The violence that does occur is often situated within the wild framework of the natural world, its turbulent seasons and many small deaths. In the bleakest story, a count conjures his heart’s desire, a beautiful naked girl, out of a hole in the snow filled with blood. She dies, he penetrates her, comes, she melts away, leaving a bloody smear on the icy ground. It’s the Sadeian story in miniature, use and discard, but it’s also a time-lapse version of life itself, the violent passage from birth to death.
After the rape works of 1973, Ana Mendieta too shifted away from documenting specific, gendered acts of violence to works that have odd, pervasive parallels with Carter’s bloody chambers and metamorphosing girls. That summer, she travelled with Hans Breder, the director of the Intermedia course and her then-lover, to Yagul, an archaeological site in the valley of Oaxaca in Mexico. Early one morning she went to the Oaxaca market and bought great armfuls of flowers with long green stems and an abundance of tiny white petals. She and Hans drove to Yagul, and there Mendieta removed all her clothes and climbed inside an open Zapotec tomb, its sides great lumps of rock. Following her precise instructions, Hans covered her body with the flowers, until her naked body was almost entirely effaced. In the photograph he took, also at her direction, the flowers rise up from between her arms and legs, blooming exuberantly from the grave.
The next work she made in Oaxaca, a year later, has even stronger Carterian echoes. This time she bought blood from a butcher at the market. She and Hans went to the Palace of the Six Patios and she lay down in the ruins of the labyrinth while he traced round her body. Then she scooped out the earth and filled the hollow with blood, a perfect illustration of Carter’s bitter little fable. In a photograph now owned by the Tate, you see first the massive stony ruins, set among damp green mountains almost obliterated by cloud. It is only slowly that the eye discerns the small, ragged shape of a body, arms upraised, composed of saturated sand, a wounded arterial red.
These images mark the beginning of Mendieta’s famous Silueta series. Between 1973 and 1980, she would make over a hundred Siluetas in Mexico and Iowa. In the earliest versions, like those she made at Yagul, she used her own body, but she soon replaced it with a surrogate, a plywood cut-out of her not-quite-five-foot form that she’d strap to the roof of her VW Beetle. She took it to marshes and creeks on the outskirts of Iowa City, most often Old Man’s Creek and Dead Tree Area. There she impressed it into the mud, the snow, the sand, filling the human-sized hollow with pigment or flowers or blood. She burned it into the earth, tipping in paraffin or gunpowder and lighting it like a candle.
Though the Siluetas were deliberately left to be reclaimed, interfered with and eventually annihilated by nature, Mendieta preserved them by way of photographs and film. These sublime, eerie images foreground the body’s vanishing. They look like graves, obviously, or murder sites, but they also suggest more ecstatic or miraculous translations: fables by Ovid in which a girl transforms herself into a tree or deer, leaving behind the tangled evidence of her departure. In their attentiveness to decay, they likewise recall kusozu, the medieval Japanese paintings produced for the purpose of Buddhist meditation, which reveal the nature of impermanence by depicting the nine stages of decomposition of the corpse of a noblewoman.
I was introduced to the Siluetas by the same boyfriend who made the film about boarding school. I found them captivating, even exhilarating. There was something immensely freeing about seeing those bodily forms melt or be washed away, as if some knot in my own body was also being eased apart. They attested to fluidity and they also made a distinction, a gap, as Dworkin never could, between the native violence of bodily existence and the violence of misogyny. ‘I don’t think that you can separate death and life,’ Mendieta explained in an interview with Linda Montano. ‘All my work is about those two things – it’s about Eros and life and death.’ The Siluetas in particular are about cyclical time, contextualising violence in a much larger frame of material impermanence. Mendieta’s own body, small, female, Cuban, pitches for universality, and it’s up to the viewer whether they accept it or not.
What she captures is the certainty of bodily change, everything shifting and dissolving, matter on its dance through time. The abiding power of her work is that she used violent material in ways that feel full of liberating possibility, but that doesn’t mean she herself was out of harm’s way. She died in violent and uncertain circumstances, and in the murky aftermath her work was used as evidence in court that she was culpable for her own death.
Mendieta moved to New York in 1978. There she joined the women’s gallery A.I.R., on 97 Wooster Street in SoHo. Established in 1972, A.I.R. was the first not-for-profit, artist-directed and maintained gallery for women in the United States. Like Virago, it was an attempt to tackle the exclusion of women in the arts by seizing control of the means of production. As the gallery’s ‘Short History’ explains, the name stood for Artists in Residence, ‘announcing that women artists were now permanent residents in the art world.’ Mendieta loved it at first, but she resigned after two years, declaring her frustration with the white, middle-class nature of American feminism.
In 1983, she won the Rome Prize, spending a joyful year at the American Academy, a beautiful complex of buildings set high on the Janiculum. It was a relief to be back in a Latin culture and she stayed on in the Eternal City after the fellowship ended. In January 1985, she got married there, to the American minimalist artist Carl Andre, with whom she’d had an on-off relationship for the past five years. He continued to be unfaithful and by September she was telling friends that she planned to divorce him.
Love aside, her life was going well. In Rome, she’d made a significant shift from the Siluetas and other transient outdoor works to studio sculpture, physical objects that could be exhibited or sold. She had a major show coming up at the New Museum in New York and she’d also been commissioned to make a permanent public installation in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, her largest work to date. In August she came back to New York for a few weeks, staying at Andr
e’s penthouse at 300 Mercer, a luxury high-rise in Greenwich Village, while she dealt with evicting a problematic subletter in her own more modest apartment on Sixth Avenue, near the Spring Street subway.
At around 5:30am on Saturday 8 September, Mendieta fell thirty-four storeys from the bedroom window at 300 Mercer, smashing so heavily into Delion’s grocery on Waverley Place that she left the indentation of her body in the tar-paper roof. She was naked except for a pair of blue bikini pants. The impact of the fall broke all her major bones. Her head was smashed in, the skin of her upper right arm ripped off, every organ in her body damaged. She was thirty-six years old.
When Andre called 911 at 5:29am, he said to the operator: ‘My wife is an artist and I am an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, uh, exposed to the public than she was and she went to the bedroom and I went after her and she went out the window.’ When the police spoke to him at dawn, after they’d found the body, he said: ‘You see, I am a very successful artist and she wasn’t. Maybe that got to her, and in that case, maybe I did kill her.’ Nobody had asked him if he had.
Later he said that she had jumped and later still that she had fallen while trying to close or perhaps open the bedroom window. He was arrested and tried for her murder, waiving his right to a jury trial and choosing not to testify. With very few exceptions, the art world closed ranks around him, just as the literary world had closed around Mailer during his trial for stabbing his wife a generation earlier. In February 1988, nearly three years after Mendieta’s death, he was acquitted by the judge, who concluded that there was insufficient evidence to convince him beyond reasonable doubt of Andre’s guilt. Because of a peculiarity of New York State Criminal Procedure Law, the trial records were then permanently sealed, which means the only way to access the police and court proceedings now is via contemporary newspaper reports or by reading Robert Katz’s 1990 book Naked by the Window. Katz attended the trial and conducted exhaustive interviews with all the main partici-pants. Despite its schlocky title, his book is the most detailed record of the trial now in existence.