Call/Response 005 - Writing About The Beauty of Choice in Women's Art & Aesthetics

In this episode of Call/Response: Writers on Art & Artists on Literature, professor, writer and multi-media artist Wendy Steiner talks with us about her latest book, creative inspiration and the role of women's choice in art.

Call/Response: Writers on Art & Artists on Literature is produced by K.Co Press.

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Transcript

Transcript:

You're listening to Call and Response with K.Co Press, Conversations with Writers on Art and Artists on Literature.  I'm Stephanie Khattak. 

Wendy Steiner is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her many books, she is an opera librettist and a multimedia artist. Her most recent book, "The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art and Freedom" is available now from Columbia University Press.

Hi Wendy, thanks for talking to us today. Why don't you tell me a little bit about your book?

Well, it covers a lot of ground. I guess that's the first thing to say.  It's about why art is important.  And why and what it has to do with the issue of free choice  especially in women's lives. And it's a kind of  odd book in that way, in that it makes a case for art and aesthetics as the rock bottom foundation of human beings. 

I once introduced myself to somebody and they asked what I did, and I said I was an aesthetician. And they said, "Oh, I had a great facial last week." You know, it was sort of like, oh, my God, I mean, this is what — how little people care about aesthetics and the study of art and all that.  And in fact, that's been my unfortunate realization through much of my life.

I care about art, and a lot of nice people I know care about art, but a lot of people don't, or just don't have time to think about it, or aren't interested, or one thing or another.  And I've always sort of accepted that as an academic, you write for a small group of people, (and it gets) smaller all the time. 

But, through a series of discoveries that I made before I wrote this book, I came to the conclusion that art is fundamental, and that I had to make a case for that, and I did.  And it has the further good purpose for me of putting together various different aspects of my life that didn't have a lot to do with each other beforehand. 

You know, writing books about art, teaching art, being a mother, caring about  freedom and political issues ... it's hard to put a lot of that together in a coherent whole. So this book attempts to do that.

How do women's freedoms of choice drive aesthetics in the humanities?

I don't think I would've written this book  if it hadn't been for my reading Richard O. Prum, who is an evolutionary scientist and an ornithologist, and published a book called "The Evolution of Beauty." His claim is that sexual selection, which is one of the two sort of engines of evolution, is an aesthetic choice that in the animal world is mostly left up to females and in choosing their mates.

They transform their species by expressing their preferences, their pleasure and what makes them pleased in a mate. And passing on those genes therefore to succeeding generations, and so on. And, of course they can be prevented from doing that, by forced marriages and rape and all kinds of other things and other kinds of circumstances in which the free choice of female selectors is not permitted. And that happens in the animal world as well as in the human world.   

And Richard Prum, in his book, shows the lengths to which females have gone in the past to preserve their freedom of choice in that and all the structures of behavior that get set up among males to attract their attention and make them want to choose them.  And on the other hand, the escape from violence and repression that allows women to choose freely by consulting what they care about. So, when I read that, it was a "eureka moment" for me because the theory of aesthetics that I had proposed through a few books that I had written before that, was that beauty is the realization of what pleases you.  

When you have the experience of beauty, it's not just that you see something else, but that you see yourself being pleased by it. And that, in many cases, is revelatory in the sense that you didn't know that X would please you or in seeing that you're pleased by X, you learn who you are in an important sort of way.

And very often you talk to other people about what pleases you, and they talk to you about what pleases them. So, it becomes a kind of social interactive kind of thing, and helps build communities and such. This is very different from the kind of standard account of aesthetics by Kant, and Enlightenment philosophers in general in which the experience of beauty and art or nature is supposed to lift you out of your individual physical, temporal existence and suspend you in a world of so-called disinterested interest, where your own personal concerns about what preserves your life, and what you need in order to live, like food and money and love, cease to be important. You have a kind of experience that exceeds that, that stands above it. That takes you beyond. Whereas I had been arguing for a few decades that the experience of beauty is all about discovering what is particular to you as a person, and being open to learning that. Then to sort of place it in relation to what pleases other people, so it isn't just kind of self-centered business. It becomes social.

But, the reason we love it so much is that it's so personal in that way. I had said to myself, that's all very well and good, you know, here we go to art museums, and we look at pictures and learn about who we are, and that's very nice.

But again, the world sort of treats that as a form of entertainment, and it's nice, but it's not world-shaking. It isn't  historically important, the choices that we make and the discovery of our choices in light of what Richard Prum was saying about what drives the evolution of species. 

That is the expression by myriad individuals, of fair pleasure in the passing of that down through the generations, and the preserving of the freedom of that choice. 

So, I suddenly began to think that this idea of the "I like," which is what I call a profoundly important idea for people and art, which is kind of an object lesson in that, as a way of cultivating your liking and helping you understand it, placing you as a liker in the world in relation to other people.

In your book, you talk about how to assess  problematic works (understanding that there's not a cut and dried right answer.) What questions can people keep in mind while viewing these works to either form their own opinions or to put the work in context?

When you're faced with problematic works, as we are all the time, art doesn't always make it very easy to experience that liking. You can can sort of cast the work aside and say this is improper, or forbidden, or disgusting, or politically incorrect, or any number of things.

But to my way of thinking, it's much more valuable to you for you to ask yourself,  what does it mean to me? How do I respond to it? And you can be disgusted, and you can be put off, and you can be disapproving. That's perfectly fine and legitimate as long as you think about it. As long as you consider why and whatever it is in you that is responding that way.

So much of your work is a combination of many different art forms, both in its inspiration and its realization. And I'm sure that many creative people can relate. So how do you separate or organize so many different ideas and combine relevant ideas, themes, or methods into a piece?

Well, I try not to separate ideas! I try to put things together and I've done that. I did my dissertation a million years ago on Gertrude Stein and one of the chapters was on Cubism. And so, it was a very rigorous sort of thing.

It wasn't just that she had friends who were Cubists. It was a real attempt to try and understand what that (style of) painting had to do with her very strange writing. I've always been interested in the way the arts inform each other in that way—or sometimes inform each other in that way, and I've written at least as much about visual art as about literature, even though I was always in an English department and always taught courses within a literature curriculum.

But, I've been interested in  the way the visual and the verbal interact. And now with my operas, I'm interested in the way the musical interacts with the visual and the verbal and, and so on. But it's important within a university to have, just for the smooth running of things, a distinction or compartmentalization.

But, I found it more and more difficult to confine my interests through a particular limited discipline. Since I retired about ten years ago, it's been a relief just to let my ideas go wherever they go. The last opera that I did, which was just done in May, was about a photographer, an artist who's talking to her guests at an opening of her work, trying to explain how much she wants to make contact through her work with audiences and through the experience that they each have. So in a way, it's  a kind of  fictionalization and a dramatization of the ideas that I express in this book. 

And in fact the introduction to this book ("The Beauty of Choice) describes my very first opera which was  based on the "Wife of Bath's Tale" by Chaucer, in which a knight who is raped to maiden is condemned to death unless he can find the answer to the question what women want most.  And so, he goes on a quest for a year and a day to find that out, and he asks a bunch of women and gets a bunch of different answers.  

And, not to give away the ending or anything like that, but, in other words, sort of surprisingly, those issues of  freedom of choice—what do women want—the relationship between art and and mating had come up all over the place in my work. And after all, Chaucer's been around for, I don't know, 800 years?

Aside: ...I'm having trouble counting at this point, but 1400 and we're now at 600 and some years... These ideas are perennial ideas. I also have a chapter about the method that I follow for this, which was inspired in a way by Japanese artists from the tenth and the eleventh century, Sei Shōnagon and her "Pillow Book,"  which is like a diary, or a commonplace book in which she makes a lot of lists,  among other things. She tells little stories too, but she makes a million lists of things she likes — kinds of things that she likes—and she makes a lot of lists of things she doesn't like. It's her way of saying who she is is to talk about what she likes. But, she does it in this associative manner rather than a logical manner.

And my book, I think it's got a lot of logic in it, and responsible scholarship and all that sort of thing. But it's also a little bit associative and meandering.

When you were writing and researching for your book, what are some things that you learned that surprised you?

Well, first it was that Richard Prum thing for sure, that animals are part of the aesthetic sphere. And  I discovered how I'm sort of a...reluctant feminist in a way. It's not that I...I'm proof of the cause of women for sure. After all, it's my cause. But growing up, I was not a sort of political (person), I don't have any political badges that I earned by my feminist activities, and I was brought up to think that it didn't matter what your political views were when you were doing research and studying things. A lot has changed since I was a young student. But I have, in, studying the arts and teaching  about art and making art now, (learned that) you just can't get away from women's issues because again, women's issues are all about freedom of choice. And that is an essential theme in all of art.

If you look at the number of operas that are about women being coerced in one way or another, and dying horrible deaths because they'd rather die than be forced to do whatever they're being forced to do.   Or making bad choices. "Portrait of a Lady," by Henry James, about a woman who had an unusually free choice as a young woman in terms of who she would marry, and made a very bad choice out of it. 

And, there are parents who coerce their children. There are endless stories about this. There are also stories about men who aren't very discriminating in their choices at all. The Casanovas and Don Juans and people like that, who behave very much the way Richard Prum describes male animals behaving, which is to say they maximize their chances for their genes to get passed along by making as many females pregnant as they can.

That is a story that gets told over and over and over again. The infidelity of men and the crushing disappointment of women for that.

And so how did you choose and prioritize the artworks to feature in the book? 

Some of them were inspiring, like the "Pillow Book." The book is sort of set up with four big sections, and each section ends with concentrating on an artist, more or less. There's a little variation in that. And, most of the artists in the book are, are women, are female.  

And, they vary greatly. For example, there's a chapter on (The Heroinat Memorial) memorial to rape victims in Kosovo. The chapter is front and center devoted to that, to describing and explaining that work, but it wanders around an awful lot.

So in that case, you know, just as background of course, everybody knows about the ethnic cleansing and in 1999 in Kosovo. According to a UN study, there were 20,000 women who were raped in that (ethnic cleansing), and the U.N., took over the administration of the country for a while, but when it became  a sovereign nation again, one of the first things it did was initiate a contest for designs for a monument to those rape victims.

And, you know, they were not, by any means, the only people who suffered and that ethnic cleansing was horrible in every way. But here was a country that wanted to focus on the suffering of women during that war. And there are very, very few memorials  to rape victims in the world. Very few compared to the number of memorials to soldiers and who died in battle and so on. So there you have an artwork it's quite an interesting one.  It led to the cover illustration of my book. That, in trying to explain how it goes about memorializing those women,  led to a whole chapter.

On the other hand there's a chapter on Marlene Dumas, who is one of the great  oil painters of contemporary art. I've been writing about her off and on for decades.  She is someone who spends a lot of her time, a lot of her work  representing women. Representing them in a very uninhibited way. She incorporates the whole range of the way that women have been represented, including pornography, and by men and so forth in her work. And, she says very interesting things about what she's doing as well. She's a very, very brilliant artist.   

And then there's a chapter that I like a lot, about the art of a woman called Barbara MacCallum, who is a multimedia artist  trained as a fabric artist. She's married to  a planetary physicist, and they've been married for 50 years. She makes these gigantic tapestry like artworks with plaster casts of his body as part of the artwork, and the huge tapestries are made of the off-prints of obsolete articles that he has written that she tears into little bits, and washes, and bakes, and sews together and makes into these incredible pieces—fabric expanses.

They're just beautiful. And, the whole thing is sort of these wonderful expanses, some often clothes. She sews them into clothes on plaster casts of her husband. And, she thinks of the whole thing as a way of carrying on their marriage throughout the 50 years that they've been married, where she takes his science and uses it. She bakes it and washes it, does all these women's art things to it,  women's tasks, and turns it into an artwork. So, in a sense, she is joining with him in terms of her art and what he does as a scientist, but on her terms, on artistic terms.  

I have a chapter on Picasso, because Picasso...on the one hand, he's such a great artist, and on the other hand, he's such a controversial figure, since he was such a womanizer, and people now, (such as) feminists and those especially who are proponents of "Me Too," find his behavior to have been cruel at times.

And, so what does that have to do with liking his work? Can we still like it if we don't like him or we don't approve of him becomes the real question.  And there was the chapter centered on an exhibition of his work called "Beloved by Picasso," which was mounted by the modern art museum in Denmark, in the Arken.

And the poor curators, I mean, the thing about Picasso is that the women that he loved or liked end up in his pictures. So, if you're upset about how he treated women, you're going to be upset about Picasso, you know, because you can't escape it in any way. And the curators wanted to pose that as an issue, so I wrote this essay about it. I find these questions fantastically important and interesting because they have to do with not only what I like and what we may or may not like in the world, but they have to do with our freedom.

I mean, when somebody says Picasso is objectionable, and so his art should not be put in a museum, that is inhibiting my ability to look at Picasso. The same for many, many, many other artists who've recently been discredited for one reason or another. I'm a big proponent of freedom of expression, and that freedom of expression includes the freedom to appreciate and to have access  to forms of expression.

I wrote a book called "The Scandal of Pleasure," which is about various political correctness scandals of the 90s, which are much different, I think, from the ones that we're having now, but still related to them. Museums were taken to court for showing certain artworks.

And (in the case of) Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," his life was threatened and his translator was murdered—assassinated—because of that work. There have been prices to pay  for the idea that art should be controlled and expression should be controlled. And, you know, these are life and death issues sometimes   because our ability to process expression in the world is so tied up to our sense of our own self expression and freedom, and our ability to function as citizens in a democratic world.

What are some questions or topics that readers should consider when they're reading the book?

Well, obviously, whether, whether it makes any sense or not to them! But, maybe to keep an open mind and ask themselves what it is about the arts that they care about. Why do they spend time going to movies, reading books, going to concerts, whatever they do. The number of answers to that far exceeds my book.

But on the other hand, I'm really trying to come to grips with that. Because we so often take art as just a given. You know, it's sort of obviously a good thing. Or maybe for some people it's obviously not a good thing. But, you know, we seldom ask ourselves what our stake in it is. Why it becomes part of our lives in some way, and whether it has any real importance there.

And so that's really the point of the book. To make people slow down and think about why they care about art. 

How did you come to focus your career on the intersection of women and culture? Has it always been an interest of yours, or was there an "aha" moment? 

Well, I operate in a very intuitive fashion, as you know. I sort of follow trains of thought and they always lead to women in this (context.) I've written about so many women artists and women writers, even though I don't set out to do that, because I'm not trying to write a history of women in this.

But, I find that the problems that are laid out...like, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," for example, is a tremendously important text for me in that the monster that Dr. Frankenstein creates is a fabrication that he puts together. A live being. And so it's a case of a man you know, giving birth to another being, but he doesn't care about this other being. This monster. In fact, he is repulsed by it! And so it's really, I mean, it sounds maudlin to say it, but it's about a child who isn't loved by his father.  And it's interesting that the movie that Emma Stone was in this year, "Poor Things," takes the Frankenstein story and plays with it.

And there've been endless takeoffs and developments of Frankenstein. So  there's a case of a woman's—Mary Shelley's—creating a kind of an archetype.  An archetypal story that is so fundamental to us.

And, there's Shōnagon in the year 1000 in Japan. Believe it or not, this woman who is living in a culture where, except in the court, women have almost nothing in the way of, of rights. And she is a courtier, to be sure! But the way that she describes it, I mean, her concerns with clothes, her concerns with colors, her concerns with other people and their behavior. It could be Vogue magazine today, you know, honestly! And that is one of the interesting things, too. I think that women's aesthetics, the part of aesthetics that are always sort of associated with women like clothes and hair and makeup and house decorating and, you know, all that sort of thing are, are always demeaned.

They're always sort of treated as popular and unimportant and trivial and so on.  Look at the industries that support this! I mean, maybe these women making aesthetic choices make the economic world go 'round to a large degree, without getting any credit for it. And without getting any respect for it in a way. 

And why did they do all these things to make them attractive, themselves attractive  to men and to all, to people in general?

Can you share a little bit about your writer's routine? How did you incorporate visual art into that routine for this book?   

I wouldn't say that I have a synesthetic mind or anything like that. I mean, I can tell seeing from hearing from smelling and so forth. But, I don't find big borders between these things. So, very often, it doesn't matter whether a work is in writing or in a visual medium or music or something else. It can lead me into a line of thinking that relates to other things. And so I just don't see the boundaries. 

Think about the way multimedia art is now perfectly well- established, whereas 30 years ago, if you were a multimedia artist, you were a novelty, you were unusual. People were much more limited to their disciplines at the time, and to some degree, those disciplines still are limited, still have boundaries around them. But I think that more and more people are thinking across the lines.

Where do you like to go see art where you live?

I've been in New York for 20 years now, but I travel too, and I go to art museums wherever I travel. So, I don't have a single favorite museum, but in New York, I mean, going to the Met, it's just like heaven! You know, first of all, the curators are really brilliant people. You can see that in the choices they make, in the presentations that they give. It's so thought-provoking and so constantly changing, and interesting, taking you to different places. And, they take chances on things— it's very exciting!

And, of course, Museum of Modern Art has that  as well. And the Frick! New York is just fabulous for visual art. But so is the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert in London, and the Louvre...and, you know, there's no end to wonderful museums in the world.

What do you read when you're not researching and writing your own books? What do you like to read for fun?

I like spy novels and mystery novels, and I'm not ashamed of that!

Where's the best place for people to buy your book?

You can order it online from everywhere that sells books, or from Columbia University Press's website.   

Is there anything else that you'd like to add that I haven't asked you about today?

I just finished editing the video from that opera that had its premiere in New York in May. It's called "Upon Reflection," and it'll soon be posted on my YouTube  channel.  So I'm very excited about that! That's been a huge amount of work.

All right! Well, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Thank you very much. It's been a fun conversation.

 You're very welcome.

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Thanks for listening to this episode of Call and Response with K.Co Press.  You can find us online at www.kcopress.com , on Instagram @KCoPress  or on Facebook @KCoArts.