I’ve been thinking a bit about my thesis recently, and putting Sirc (art) and Bartholomae (criticism) into concert with each other. For our gender and cultural studies independent study reading seminar, we are reading “Feminity Slashed” by Caroline Howlett, and I’m looking forward to a good discussion on it and on a few Judith Butler texts tomorrow afternoon. Howlett made a few assertions that I wanted to note before they left my head:
“I contend that to pose a bald distinction between ‘life’ and ‘art’ may be misleading where the term ‘life’ elides a set of cultural practices which fall outside the usual canons of art: playfrul or disruptive modes of dress, startling photographic self-representations, public performances of all kinds” (73).
Howlett discusses Mary Richardson’s slashing of the Rokeby Venus in 1914, which Howlett asserts is an act of reauthoring:
The complexity of Richardson’s act, and of her understandings of it, are apparant in her earliest articulations. A hand-written version of her short statement, in which she states that she has ‘tried to destroy’ the picture, shows that she initionally wrote: ‘I have destroyed the picture’. This tension between the sense in which the painting has been destroyed, and the sense in which it has not, precisely articulates the nature of Richardson’s act: she has neither obliterated the Venus nor left it as it was. Rather her attack constitutes, as Nead argues, ‘a -reathoring of the work’ that destroyed in in the sense that it ‘ruptured the aesthetic and culture codes of the painting’: Need cites the Daily Telegraph‘s comment that ‘yesterday a female miscreant left her own markings on the work with an axe’. (83)
Part of re-authoring and creating is switching the audience of a work. Women suffragettes in the early 1900s re-authored feminity, indeed made femme-initiy, according to Howlett, by switching the audience of their gender performance from men to women. Richardson’s act switched the audience of the slashed painting from men, who wouldn’t get her work, to women: “instead of giving pleasure to men, this new image of slashed feminity was now pleasurable to other women, or at least to suffragettes” (86).
Sirc discusses negation: the need to not engage in criticism but actually negate the dominant paradigm (as I understand it, however rudimentary). Perhaps this is linked, this avant-garde need to “destroy,” but actually, but destroying, create through the change in audience. It seems that if I were to put Richardson’s act into a composition classroom, she wouldn’t be sitting in Bartholomae’s classrom, but rather Sirc’s; indeed, I think Bartholomae might react in the way H.G. Wells did to Richardson: with an “inability to ‘read’ her act,” which Richardson believed “is not surprising… women have been restricted from making artistic representations throughout history, and ground-breaking attempts such as her own were bound to seem new and strange” (Howlett 83).
Howlett, Caroline. “Femininity Slashed: Suffragette Militancy, Modernism, and Gender.” Modernist Sexualities. Ed. Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howeltt. Manchester UP, 2001. 72-91.
