One
Display, like choreography, is often composed of a sequence of bodily movements and a planned design of motion, form, and affect. In turn, how performers in a scene are made to encounter, engage, or interface with an environment and the objects displayed therein produces certain kinds of institutionally specific moving behaviors capable of reiterating or circumventing normative relationships between bodies and objects in space. Rigid choreographies for museum spectatorship, as Lawrence Levine has pointed out, synchronically developed alongside the cultivation of late nineteenth-century rules of decorum for theatergoing.1 At the root of such embodied restrictions is the disciplining of consuming audiences into canonical class divisions (elite/mass) and passive bodies capable of sublimating the emotional charge emanating from the stage or, in the case of museums, the exhibition with minimal, if any, interaction or reaction aside from bourgeois appreciation (e.g., applause, chin scratching).
Following the dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster, but with reference to museums, I use choreography to mean the “structuring of movement, not necessarily the movement of human beings.”2 As Foster, Randy Martin, and André Lepecki have argued, the term choreography extends to the disciplining of all kinds of social behaviors.3 I seek to reemploy this scholarship on the historical connection between choreography and colonization to propose that display choreographies in museums similarly structure movement in ways that inform the critical consciousness and emotional habitus of museumgoing as a phenomenological experience of gendered and sexual as well as raced and classed norms. I call this display choreography erotic exhibitionism, a consistent and crucial component of patriarchal perspectivalism marked by white privileged access, the slow reveal or striptease of the object itself, and the highly managed spectatorship of bodies and desires that Michael Fried has referred to as absorption.4As Randy Martin has suggested, however, choreography also refers toperformances of movement and politics as sites of resistance to rigid Eurocentric models of colonial and postcolonial identity through rechoreographed performances of reflection. Inspired by Martin, I mine histories of museum movements in search of queer choreographies, or assemblages of desiring movements, gestures, and actions that disrupt normative modes of sexual display and spectatorship.
This chapter tracks the material conditions of display choreography through two texts/encounters/instances: the first, the history of the collection and display of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting (fig. 1.1) L’origine du monde (The origin of the world) and its role in establishing Lacanian theories of the (heterosexual) gaze; the second, the history of the reception of Andrea Fraser’s 2003 film Untitled, a work that implicitly critiques the representational economies circulated through Courbet’s example. The story of the performances that occurred around these sex objects offers a unique chain of events where one can examine the profound impact of display on art historical meaning, the history of sexuality, and the cultivation of sexual consumption practices that converge and diverge at the sites where the objects became visually accessible.
1.1 L’origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet (oil on canvas, 1866). Museé d’Orsay, Paris.
Viewing these practices collectively through the lens of performance can tell us more about the relationship between visuality, sexual spectatorship, and the emergence of an elite masculine heterosexual identity in the late nineteenth century. It is my contention that this privileged stance of erotic exhibitionism continues to structure how we see and display the female body and that this mode of seeing/displaying has become so expected in spaces of exhibition that it has come to constitute a dominant but often unremarked on visual framework of commodity capitalism. This framework becomes apparent through an analysis of display as a performative materialization of certain theories (e.g., patriarchal perspectivalism and its attendant economic politics as they relate to the collection and transnational circulation of sex objects) and through the use of a queer curatorial method to conduct an analysis of these displays so as to illuminate the patriarchal heteronormativity of traditional display choreographies. Here, I use queer praxis to unpack the reiterative and citational theatricality of display as a practice in motion that socializes certain normative relationships between the objects on display and the bodies that are conditioned to move around and toward those objects in specific ways. Furthermore, the application of queer praxis to my examples in this chapter suggests the need to expand the concept of patriarchal perspectivalism beyond visuality to include repeated movements in spaces of display. I refer to this expansion as erotic exhibitionism so as to focus my analysis not on the maker of theimage but on the maker of the image’s scene of spectatorship. Much like Kendrick’s view of the Secret Museum (discussed in the introduction), erotic exhibitionism is also a theory in motion that describes a strategic negotiation to allow for the public display of the white, naked and female body, an acceptable and even tasteful form of sexual consumption perhaps best personified through the idealized conglomerate of otherwise fragmented female body parts known as the nude. When reappropriated by unlikely agents in the history of display, erotic exhibitionism also makes room for the queer potential of even the most traditional display choreographies.
In discussing the display of sexualized art and not just art as representational object, I aim to theorize the multiple embodied experiences of sexual display. I am inspired by Amelia Jones’s interest in applying the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to analyze the role of the viewer or, in her words, the interpreter.5 I hope to add to Jones’s analysis by focusing on sexual display as a choreographic engagement that manages movement and affect and to suggest that the composition of this regulated experience with an object is just as important as, if not more important than, the composition of the sex object itself. My aim here is to move beyond identity and to focus on the often slippery nature of spectatorship that does not necessarily line up with a discursive relationship to desire based in binary gender roles or sexual orientation. At the same time, I analyze erotic exhibitionism as a pivotal choreography used by the possessor and the shower of the object in the making of white masculine heterosexuality as a discrete and dominant sexual identity. This procedural move is aimed at shifting art historical attention from interpretation of the object to focus instead on the unpredictability of performance, affect, and desire and to argue for a method of deriving meaning in the space of display. When looked at through the lens of display, the meaning of the sex object becomes unhinged from the artist’s or the interpreter’s identity, and thus from subjective experience, and is instead produced experientially and contestedly in the details of the spatial encounter crafted through the curatorial labor of (erotic) exhibition(ism).
Whether an object falls to the side of high art or low art, the place it takes up in the rigidly managed and market-related divide, and its standing in the debates over the distinction between the base genre of pornography and the enlightened vision of erotic artists: the answers to these questions are wholly dependent on the context of how bodies are made to relate to a sex object.6 Walter Kendrick famously argued: “Pornography is an argument, and not a thing.” Linda Williams goes further to show how the lowbrow status of pornography is dependent on the anxiety or expectation of having or witnessing an embodied response.7 The contextuality of erotic exhibitionism as a performance determines the status of a work of art as erotic, and therefore admissible to display in the public realm, or pornographic, and therefore obscene (asin “off stage”). These distinctions, as Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, reproduce class hierarchies, but they also reproduce gendered and raced hierarchies as they assign economic value to certain objects that can remain in the category of high art through a designation of the object as erotic.8 This designation depends on the display of the white female body as nude, a theatrical mode of dress, as John Berger has reminded us, that engenders a specific display choreography where the white, masculine heterosexual subject can physically approach the object, sustain the gaze, and remain intact without threat to the heteronormative viewing posture.9
The queer potential of the display enters when feminine-gendered subjects reconfigure that relationship as spectators or, in the instance of Andrea Fraser, as artist/author. In the case of L’origine du monde, the sex object was used as a prosthetic extension of heterosexual masculinity. In this way my reading of the painting confronts many other tellings of the tale, especially those of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan, in which the represented cunt is identified in the painting as a symbol of masculine absence and thus a sign of castration.10 Instead, I position L’origine du monde as a necessary tool for constructing the phallus of Lacanian psychoanalysis and, of equal importance to my focus on the performance of display in institutional settings in museums, for normalizing certain forms of sexual consumption.
The first half of the chapter examines L’origine du monde as the quintessential example of collecting and displaying sex in the public sphere in the West. The second half comparatively analyzes a more recent scene of performance between an art object and a solitary male collector, the 2003 film Untitled by the performance artist Andrea Fraser. Much of Fraser’s work critiques institutions involved in selling and displaying art. She often uses her own body as the author and the art object, an art tactic that feminist performance artists consolidated in the 1970s (as in Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll) and that Rebecca Schneider has labeled binary terror.11 Binary terror describes a performance approach whereby a female or feminine artist uses her body to make apparent the link between ways of seeing “woman” and the ways of structuring desire according to the logic of commodity capitalism. In Untitled, Fraser showed herself having sex with an unidentified American collector who paid an undisclosed amount to participate in the sixty-minute filmic comment on the relationship between art, heterosexual sex, gender, collecting, and capitalism.
1.2 L’origine du monde, by André Masson (woodcut, ca. 1950).
When juxtaposed to L’origine du monde, Untitled offers another version of the history of sex and collecting from the perspective of the female artist as a way of exploring the gendered history of looking, touching, and possessing sex objects both within and outside the frame. I use Untitled as a methodological tool for examining the interstices of capitalism and heterosexuality with the collection and display of the naked female body precisely because its riskiness threatens to expand or even undo the second wave feminist stance that drives Schneider’s theory of binary terror. While many feminist performance artists stare down a history of patriarchal perspectivalism, Fraser takes up the reigns of erotic exhibitionism and reappropriates the genre of pornography to perform an uneasy sort of binary terror that throws into confusion what a spectator is supposed to do and feel when consuming explicit sex.
Lacan’s Cunt
I always tell the truth, but not the whole truth.—Jacques Lacan, Écrits (1972)
Lacan’s unveiling L’origine du monde went something like this:12
The year is 1957. Imagine you are an elite, white gentleman or an emerging artist visiting the country home of the famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This is La Prévôté (the provost’s house), situated in Guitrancourt, near Mantes-la-Jolie, and purchased by Lacan and his wife, Sylvia Bataille, after World War II. It is Sunday, a day when Lacan comes to Guitrancourt to work and receive patients, but you know from hearsay that the house serves other functions as well. It is also the site for lush parties where Lacan dons disguises, dresses fancily, dances, and generally flaunts his extravagance. But, as you can see, it has also become a veritable museum, a stage where Lacan exhibits his passion for collecting objets d’art and rare books. As he leads you around this simple yet spacious home, he stops in front of some of his most prized possessions to ruminate on how he “owes” so many of his “revelations” to “their powers of suggestion and the reactions they allowed him to trigger off.” Some of them, he explains after this ejaculatory phrase, are valuable because of their links to family and friends; others, he says, contain “stimulating mysteries and enigmas.”
After a meal, Lacan leads you through an ample garden to a separate outbuilding that serves as his studio. While the house is primarily a museum to his massive library (bigger than the one in the Rue de Lille), the walls and shelves of his studio teem with his art collection. Painted vases, Nasca pottery, Pueblo Indian kachina dolls, Greco-Roman and Alexandrian statuettes, ivory sculptures and erotic terra-cottas mix with paintings by Renoir, Balthus, and Derain. Several paintings by the surrealist artist André Masson, Sylvia’s brother-in-law, are also hung there. You also notice a small drawing of a skull by Giocometti and a large, rather unimpressive Monet painting of a willow tree. To the right of the door sits an ornately gilded frame. It appears quite heavy. Inside the frame is an abstract sketch on a brown background, a woodcut in the style of the surrealists. Lacan heads toward this object, and, as he slides the woodcut to the left of the frame, he tells you that, like many of the works in his studio, this thin-paneled sketch is by Masson (fig. 1.2). He tells you that it was his wife who requested that her brother-in-law make this wooden cover, an abstract reproduction of the erotic elements of the original. “The neighbors and the cleaning lady wouldn’t understand,” he says, attributing those words to Sylvia. You listen and watch intently as he fingers some sort of hidden mechanism to slowly reveal an intricately painted and close-up study of a woman’s genitalia and torso, her breasts partially flattened under the weight of gravity as she reclines on what appears to be a crumpled bed sheet. Her head and legs fall open and outside the frame. The angle of the painting places the viewer as slightly below and directly between the fleshy thighs. Lacan studies you carefully as you view the painting. He waits for a response.
To tell the story of L’origine du monde is to summon a tale of seduction that fleshes out the life of a painting in ways usually reserved for human bodies. Throughout the mysterious history of its collection, circulation, and display, the painting’s social life, as Arjun Appadurai would say,13 consisted of various owners who always revealed the object through a carefully stylized choreography reminiscent of striptease. Each and every one of its famous owners, all of whom were men, displayed L’origine du monde in ways that constructed and dramatized erotic encounters with the representation of white naked femaleness and, more specifically, the cunt. These encounters provided carefully choreographed scenes of consumption ripe for analyzing the relationship of display, as a sexualized technique, to what John Berger labeled ways of seeing.14 In many ways, L’origine du monde is the quintessential example of showing sex in the West in the post-Enlightenment period. But, while the modern visuality phenomenon that we have come to know as the male patriarchal gaze or masculinist perspectivalism is crucial to my unpacking of the collection and display of the painting, even more important to my analysis is the performative impact of this way of seeing on the consolidation of heterosexuality as a dominant sexual identity in the age of commodity capitalism.
My depiction of Lacan’s theatrical scene of unveiling L’origine du monde represents only one moment in its history of collection and display to various gendered and raced audiences. Created by Gustave Courbet in 1866, the painting was originally commissioned by Khalil Bey (later known as Khalil Sherif Pasha), an Egypt-born Turkish diplomat living and working in Paris at the time; Bey’s habitual practice was to invite other elite Parisians into his boudoir where he would literally unveil thepainting. Subsequent owners, all of whom hailed from Western or Central European nations, used double-locked frames and, in the case of Lacan, elaborate mechanical devices to transform the scene of display into a spectacularized event. These events were intended to provoke feelings of anticipation, privilege, and sexual titillation, masked or accompanied by aesthetic appreciation and scholarly investigation or, as I will also relate, anger and contempt. Jacques Lacan was the last private individual to own L’origine du monde, and after his death the French government partially settled his tax bill with his heirs by acquiring the painting for the Musée d’Orsay. There it hangs still, a source of great fascination (and at least one documentary). In the museum’s gift shop, its souvenir miniature version, the postcard, has become one of the best-selling items.15
While this chapter contains no new archival information on L’origine du monde, it shows that there is a complex set of issues that have been unaddressed already lurking in the archive. I reorganize that story to recast the painting as the central actor in a play that stages the exhibition of sex as a symbol of whiteness, masculinity, and privilege. Namely, the repeated invocations of its exhibition show a strong link between the production of white, elite heterosexuality and commodity culture. Moreover, the displayed life of L’origine du monde is the subject of myth. Only a few written accounts of viewing it exist. One description of seeing the painting while it was in the possession of Khalil Bey is that of the photographer and man about town Maxime Du Camp. While Du Camp’s experience in Khalil Bey’s dressing room in 1877 has been quoted and requoted vigorously by scholars of Courbet, Lacan, and the painting alike, the sheer scarcity of information on the performative dimensions of the painting’s display demands its repetition here:
To please a Moslem who paid for his whims in gold, and who, for a time, enjoyed a certain notoriety in Paris because of his prodigalities, Courbet, this same man whose avowed intention was to renew French painting, painted a portrait of a woman which is difficult to describe. In the dressing room of this foreign personage, one sees a small picture hidden under a green veil. When one draws aside the veil one remains stupefied to perceive a woman, life-size, seen from the front, moved and convulsed, remarkably executed, reproduced con amore, as the Italians say, providing the last word in realism. But, by some inconceivable forgetfulness, the artist who copied his model from nature, had neglected to represent the feet, the legs, the thighs, the stomach, the hips, the chest, the hands, the arms, the shoulder, the neck, and the head. The man who, for a few coins, could degrade his craft to the point of abjection, is capable of anything.
For Du Camp, the display of the painting is one that is to be expected from the “Moslem” Khalil Bey, who was known, Du Camp claimed, for his extravagant wastefulness.16 Du Camp was not alone in describing Khalil Bey as a profligate; a short 1996 documentary by Jean-Paul Fargier named after the painting was also very keen on examining Bey’s motives, more so than those of any other owner.17 For example, the film emphasized Bey’s reputation as a womanizer, a syphilis sufferer (he supposedly contracted the infection in Russia), and a licentious money squanderer who gambled away most of his inheritance on horses and a vast art collection that consisted of many nudes (such as a reproduction of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s The Turkish Bath).
For Du Camp, Courbet bowed to the wishes of Bey and degraded the value of his artistic prowess by creating a work of trash, the “portrait” of what Linda Nochlin so succinctly describes as “the female sex organ—the cunt—forbidden site of specularity and the ultimate object of male desire.”18 The intersectional implications of the racial and gendered rhetoric of Du Camp’s account have not been discussed in other retellings of his experience; for my analysis, however, they are crucial to understanding erotic exhibitionism. In this curatorial practice, sexuality acts as a spatial register of experience that hails bodies into a heterosexual, hypermasculine subject formation through the performativity of a desire dependent on the consumption of white female nudity. In this passage, we can detect the nineteenth-century binary configuration of the “West versus the rest” when it comes to a burgeoning concept of what it means to be sexually modern but also how Bey may have used a theatrical scene of sexual display to ingratiate himself into an elite Parisian society. For Du Camp, it seemed natural and typical that Bey would commission and possess L’origine du monde (though contradictory stories exist as to whether he actually commissioned it or merely purchased it after viewing it elsewhere), but what is truly shocking to Du Camp is that Courbet would debase himself, his own artistic practice, and Western cultural modes of representation entirely by providing the portrait of a white woman’s cunt to satiate the desire of a “Moslem.” In essence, Du Camp calls Courbet a whore to Khalil Bey.
Regardless of Du Camp’s hateful words, Bey and Courbet maintained a friendship after the purchase of L’origine du monde. Courbet would often request to be present for its unveiling before Bey’s guests, receiving great pleasure in witnessing the reactions of the visitors to the reveal.19 In this ritualized performance of the artist as witness to Bey’s erotic exhibitionism, he seems to try to redeem himself by inserting himself back into the frame, as it were, by being part of the exhibition value. It is precisely this move that critics denied Andrea Fraser (as we shall see shortly). Whether Courbet was present for Du Camp’s experience with the painting in Bey’s bathroom remains unclear, but what is clear, especially from the emphatic use of convulsed as a term to describe the animate state of the inanimate vulvic “portrait” of this headless, legless woman is how Du Camp claimed feelings of contempt and moral outrage as a mode of hiding his own sexual arousal.20 So too does the cunt of the female come to stand in for a person, a metonymic violence that reaches its height in Du Camp’s ironic naming of the painting a portrait. In 1986, Roger Scruton made a similar statement when he referred to Courbet’s painting as a lower portrait. In a comment that might help us understand what was emerging as the taste-laden distinction between the erotic and the pornographic in Du Camp’s day, Scruton explained: “In true erotic art, it is usually the face and not the sexual organ that provides the focus of attention.” He continued: “An art that concentrates on the sexual organs will be, not erotic, but obscene.”21 By 1986, the meaning of obscenity, while vague, had been rigorously debated in legal settings, perhaps most famously in Miller v. California (1973). Looking at Du Camp’s and Scruton’s statements side by side shows the diachronic stasis in the development of the understanding of the term, especially insofar as men are the arbiters of what counts as erotic or pornographic and the female body, and more specifically the female body parts of the face versus the cunt, becomes the material on which those unofficial and, in the case of Miller v. California, official debates are solidified into law.
While Khalil Bey was the first to own L’origine du monde, setting in motion a choreography of erotic exhibitionism that followed the painting nearly everywhere it traveled, both contemporary and current accounts, including the Fargier documentary, sought to remove him from a narrative that was otherwise dominated by elite Western Europeans. Fargier’s documentary depicts the sexual scenography of display that has marked the painting’s consumption since its creation in Paris in 1866. In the film, the thrusting movement of the camera shot renders the apparatus into a veritable phallus penetrating and retracting itself from the painted folds of L’origine du monde. The camera pans in and out, its movements made possible by the visible truck tracks that lead up to the painting. At first covered by a green velvet curtain, the painting is later revealed with great ceremony. On the enactment of this striptease by invisible hands, high-key theatrical lighting shines from eight standing light fixtures as the camera zooms in on every detail, each strand in the fluffy tuft of pubic hair, every pink fleshy crevice captured by Courbet.22
As both Fargier and Linda Nochlin explain, after Khalil Bey’s turn with the painting it disappeared for a century, but it was constantly reproduced in periodicals and books.23 Its location at Lacan’s summer home became semipublic knowledge in the 1960s after it appeared in a video seen by the French actor Alain Cuny. In the film, a man described a poor reproduction of the painting on the cover of the journal Art Press Magazine that was used to illustrate that issue’s focus on “Obscénité.” The Fargier film depicted the man touching the vaginal opening of the painting’s black-and-white reproduction with the back of his hand while saying: “It will never be someone, and as you can see, it will never move.” Allegedly, Cuny stood up during the screening and exclaimed that the painting was not lost: to the contrary, he had seen the painting behind a wooden panel in Lacan’s summer home at Guitrancourt.
But, before returning to La Prévôté, Lacan, and what I will argue to be the overlooked role of sexual display in the development of Lacanian psychoanalysis, allow me to fill in the speculative history of L’origine du monde. In 1889, twenty-one years after it is believed that Khalil Bey sold the painting to settle his gambling debts before he moved to Istanbul to become French secretary of state for foreign affairs, the writer Edmond de Goncourt stumbled on the painting in a Parisian antique shop owned by Antoine de la Narde. He wrote: “Narde asked me: ‘Have you seen this?’ And he unlocked a painting, whose exterior panel shows a village church in the snow concealing a painting that Courbet did for Khalil Bey of a woman’s stomach with a prominent black mound of Venus over a half open pink aperture. Looking at this painting, which I had never seen before, I had to pay tribute to Courbet. This stomach is as beautiful as the flesh of a Correggio.”24 This time the outer panel is Le Château de Blonay, a painting by Courbet or his assistant that is now on display in the Budapest Fine Arts Museum.25 Apparently, L’origine du monde circulated among the elites in Hungary as well, for we know that in 1913 the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris sold both paintings to two Jewish-Hungarian art collectors, Baron Herzog and Baron Hatvany. They took the painting and its double-locked frame with the painted “castle in the snow” to Budapest, where Herzog kept Le Château de Blonay and Hatvany held onto L’origine du monde. Hatvany remained the sole owner of the painting for more than thirty years but, like Lacan, installed it inconspicuously in his personal office. The painting became one of many in his vast art collection but was seen by very few people, if anyone at all.
Meanwhile, in Germany the Nazis burned books and art that for them represented a corpus of work that I will call in chapter 2 a visualliteracy of degeneracy. As I will demonstrate, sex played a decisive factor in choosing what to destroy and what to display during the Third Reich’s ascendancy to power. In 1944, after Hungary allied itself with Germany, SS officers occupied the Hatvany villa in Buda overlooking the Danube. Hatvany fled without his possessions, and from 1944 to 1945 the Red Army bombed Budapest. Hatvany’s home was looted first by the Germans, then by Soviets, and finally by other unorganized local persons. Among this chaos, L’origine du monde vanished. To this day it is unknown who pilfered it.
In 1955, L’origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5 million francs to Jacques Lacan. It was fitting that Lacan would become the last person to privately collect and display the painting. Amelia Jones has argued that Lacan’s acquisition of it might have contributed to his theory of the alienated gaze as discussed in his series of lectures “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A.”26 In these lectures, Lacan proposed that we never fully “own” our bodies in the performance of looking, an act that he treats as symbolically comparable to the domain of desire. For him, all pictures are “trap[s] for the gaze.” His lectures forged a definition of the gaze as something that “slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded” in human relationships to things, as in the viewership of paintings. His primary scopic field of interest was a “traumatic” and “primal scene” teeming with the potential for encounter that encompassed either too much or too little pleasure.27 Precisely, his theory of jouissance depended on the keeping of the object of desireat a certain distance. In keeping with this theory, he revealed to only a few people that he owned the painting, and he displayed it even more rarely. So, while Jones seems correct in her suggestion that L’origine du monde provided one of the primary texts, if not the primary text, for theorizing the gaze and its relationship to patriarchal heterosexual desire, I argue that the choreography of display had the most profound impact on Lacan’s theory of the gaze and its implications for female sexuality. The reiterated performance of erotic exhibitionism as a sexual display technique institutionalized the white heterosexual gaze as the founding principle of visuality as it functions in commodity capitalism.
The scenography of the ways in which the painting was kept (privately) and displayed (theatrically) produced the affective and choreographic conditions of encounter that made up the raw data of Lacan’s observations. This raw data set was not only a result of his participant observations. Rather it described a hypothesis that Lacan went to great lengths to produce and control. He converted his personal office in his summer home into an observational laboratory to witness the effect of revealing the painting, and he used Masson’s woodcut sketch as the sublime precursor to the overwhelming backdrop of the cunt. (He claimed that Sylvia requested that the painting be covered with the Masson sketch and not that the sketch be used as an elaborate device for its unveiling.) It is in this scenario of pursuing a research question with the answer already embedded in it that I locate L’origine du monde as a prosthetic extension of elite heterosexual masculinity. The cunt became, not a terrifying marker of phallic absence, but the original site for the construction of the phallus of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The need to naturalize the viewership of this racialized and gendered embodied presence became necessary to disciplinary regimes of visuality that continue to dictate the acceptable parameters of representation that exist in institutional spaces of display. That is, the aesthetic display of white female nakedness (otherwise known as the nude), not the representation itself, became the primary mode of furnishing public sites for the high-culture performance of a phallic prosthesis via the way of seeing known as patriarchal perspectivalism.
The role of spectator response to the painting was just as central to the performative choreography of erotic exhibitionism as the role of the exhibitor himself. While in all cases the exhibitor in this story was always gendered male and cast as the quintessential heterosexual, the performance of erotic exhibitionism served as a means of testing one’s heterosexual aptitude. Consider, for example, the only recorded account of Lacan’s display of L’origine du monde, which he revealed to the memoirist James Lord and the artist Dora Maar, the lover of and muse to Pablo Picasso. While the year of this event is unknown, I deduce that Lacan showed the painting to these two sometime between his 1955 acquisition of the painting and 1961.28 Lord described the event in these words:
We were the only guests. . . . After lunch we were escorted outside to a separate, small building, Lacan’s studio. Dora whispered to me, “He’ll show off his Courbet.” In a heavy gilt frame to the right of the door hung a sketchy abstraction, on a brown background, by Masson. And indeed Lacan, addressing himself virtually for the first time to me said, “Now I’m going to show you something extraordinary.” The Masson was painted with a thin panel which slid to the left out of the frame, revealing behind it a detailed and very beautifully painted close-up study of the genitalia of a fleshy, almost corpulent female. I made the exclamations of admiration obviously expected, wondering at the same time whether Lacan might not have provided this surprise in sly supposition that the image would hardly be one to rouse my sexual excitement. . . . Lacan had brought with him his volume from the dining room and soon settled at his desk, saying goodbye to Dora and me with a courtesy so exaggerated as to be almost rude.29
In her search for the genealogy of the painting’s provenance, Linda Nochlin argued that L’origine du monde represents the “repressed or displaced in the classical scene of castration anxiety . . . [and] has also been constructed as the very source of artistic creation itself.”30 In Lord’s description of Lacan’s performance of display, Lacan, like Courbet, used the painting to portray the origin of the world as a landscape made up of female body parts, but one that was brought into being, into the scopic field of the gaze, by the male creator (in the case of Courbet, the artist, and, in the case of Lacan, the analyst–cum–erotic exhibitionist). Whether the lack inherent in the theory of castration anxiety ultimately rested with the symbolic female body (the world) or the male creator was inconclusive and is, for my analysis, somewhat irrelevant. Rather the location of anxiety became allayed or at least temporarily displaced through the intermediary role of he who displayed. He who displayed had the power to watch the horror, the anger, or the overweening arousal caused not by the object but by the conditions under which the object was seen, which were, in the case of Lacan, furnished by him or, in the case of both the artist and the analyst, carefully choreographed to create a scenario that had been witnessed before.
In James Lord, however, Lacan had an unorthodox spectator-guest. While Lord’s affair with Maar is documented, he identified himself as a “homosexual” in the 1993 memoir Picasso and Dora, from which the memory of viewing L’origine du monde is extracted. It is possible that Lacan always acted this part of the morose exhibitionist; that is, in removing the surrealist variant of the Masson panel, he brought the symbolic ideal close to him yet again, and he became despondent, plagued by his own sense of awe/disgust (à la the sublime) and/or his own castration anxiety. I prefer, however, to think that Lord’s clearly affected admiration, rather than his spontaneous contempt, shock, or arousal, was what led Lacan to be so brusque in his farewell. Rumors of Lord’s sexuality were common among this elite society of artists and scholars, and Lord himself entertained the notion that Lacan’s performance included the “sly supposition that the image would hardly be one to rouse [his] sexual excitement.” Without the reaction that the display of the painting typically elicited, Lacan’s theory of the stability of a spectator identity, which he claimed to be universal, fell flat in the presence of a nonnormative, homosexual viewer. The effect of erotic exhibitionism depended just as much on the supposition of an absolute “eye,” understood to be white, heterosexual, and masculine, as on the scenographic conditions of the display. When one of the intersecting mobile elements was reorganized into a parody of the expected response, the painting was not the only thing revealed; along with it, the fragility of normative sexual desire was also unveiled. So too in Dora Maar’s suggestive whisper, “He’ll show off his Courbet,” is the anticipation of how display, male artistic identity, and the hidden object become collapsed onto the promised reveal of the painting as a phallic prosthesis.
The response to L’origine du monde that the striptease-like display was meant to engender was one of genuine shock mixed with awe, disgust, and arousal. In response to viewing Khalil Bey’s performance of display, Maxime Du Camp also expressed that Courbet’s painting represented “realism’s last word,” not through an avant-garde aesthetic that pushed painting to its next great historical moment, but rather through “degrad[ing] his craft to the point of abjection.”31 Over one hundred years later, Slavoj Žižek made a similar argument about the painting but also argued for an understanding of it as an omen of the postmodern condition. For Žižek, the visuality of sex is one of a corpus of shock values that has become enfolded into a capitalist art market system that feeds on a notion of perversion. While he never defines perversion, he argues that the manipulation of it single-handedly propelled the reproduction of consumerist logic specific to capitalism: “As in the domain of sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: such shocking excesses are part of the system itself. Perhaps this is one possible definition of postmodern as opposed to modernist art: in postmodernism, the transgressive excess loses its shock value and is fully integrated into the established market.” For Žižek, L’origine du monde signals the beginning of the “disruptive global catastrophe,” and Andy Warhol’s ready-made works of Coca-Cola bottles mark “the end of the world.” Both the experience of viewing the cunt and the Coke, the consumption of the latter serving as his example of consumerist logic par excellence, represent the objet petit a. To riff on his example of Coke by replacing it with the cunt: the more [cunt] you drink, the thirstier you are, the more profit you make, the more you want.32
To demonstrate, Žižek takes up Lacan’s definition of the sublime, both an abstract ideal and the feminine object of the desiring male gaze, to argue that Courbet’s painting precociously forced a break between traditional and modern art that was predicated on what he characterized as “a radical gesture of desublimation”; that is, Žižek goes on, “[Courbet] took the risk and simply went to the end by directly depicting what previous realistic art merely hinted at as its withdrawn point of reference.” Much like Du Camp, he argues that the outcome in L’origine du monde transformed the sublime into an object of abjection, which he very colorfully describes as “an abhorrent, nauseating excremental piece of slime.” Žižek ultimately stresses how L’origine predicted “the psychotic collapse of the symbolic space” and highlighted the link between the Marxist notion of surplus value and the Lacanian notion of the objet petit a or surplus enjoyment in the capitalist commodification ideology. He does not, however, comment on how the complex conditions of display play a role in the formation of capitalist practices. As a result, it is the female body as represented by Courbet, and not the commodification of erotic exhibitionism, that becomes for him abject, trash, and slime. If he insists on movement as critical to his argument, specifically the bringing near of an elusive thing that is sublime only insofar as it disappears precisely at the moment it is desired and grasped for, the ways in which L’origine du monde was shown demand analysis. In concentrating on “the torso of a shamelessly exposed, headless, naked and aroused female body, focusing on her genitalia,” Žižek overlooks the shameless performance of erotic exhibitionism.33 It is this curatorial performance, and not the painting itself, that functions as the primary mechanism of commodity capitalism, an apparatus that so depends on the abjection and consumerism of the female body and that he otherwise voraciously critiques.
While Žižek describes the collapse of symbolic space with the desublimation of the female body as an object of desire, by not attending to the performance and exhibition of the picture as the locus of meaning he fails in his own Lacanian logic in imagining previous pictures of nudes to be the source of the desire, however forestalled. But the entire apparatus of viewing around the picture, its famous mystery (Nochlin may have inadvertently contributed to this even as she critiqued it), becomes a way of recovering that lost promise of the withdrawn point of reference/object of desire. Žižek only indirectly attends to display as a factor when he mentions postmodernism and the loss of the shock value of transgressive excess. But it is the exhibition of L’origine du monde that becomes the means of reinstalling some sense of the painting as a locus of meaning on the body of the white female in the very picture that would seem to finally make that collapse. Its popularity as a postcard in the gift shop of the Musée d’Orsay provides convenient capitalist proof of its ongoing effectiveness in producing the very symbolic space that Žižek says it collapses.
To examine the traces of how L’origine du monde was displayed is to uncover the role of shock production and its accompanying gestures and facial expressions as an integral affective choreography for consuming the female body in the organizing telos of commodity capitalism. As Žižek has argued, an acceptable kind of shock value has become immersed in this logic. I want to take this notion further and suggest that paying attention to the transitional atmosphere of spectatorship in the scene of display between Courbet’s painting in 1866 and what is understood as the genre of hard-core pornography in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first demonstrates the persistence yet also the fragility of the social and cultural hierarchies of power and pleasure supported in these sites. Again, Jones’s notion of interpretation and the instability of identity becomes important to reevaluating Žižek’s version of the objet petit a from a feminist perspective, but so too does a focus on sexual pleasure rather than sexuality as an identity category to recognize different possibilities of erotic meaning making.
In distinguishing between different kinds of pornography and questioning the intertwining of L’origine du monde with hard-core pornography from the nineteenth century forward, Kelly Dennis makes a queer contribution to debates on the feminist or sexist import of the painting. Dennis prefers Michael Fried’s argument that, like many other Courbet paintings, L’origine du monde inspired a more slippery embodiment of spectatorship that is neither the detached voyeuristic male gaze nor the female spectator who, as Nochlin described her, “identifie[s] sadistically with the objectifying male gaze or . . . masochistically with the objectified female nude.”34 In so claiming this post-Mulvey theory of spectatorship that, more in line with Miriam Hansen’s scholarship, allows women a desiring standpoint, Dennis rereads Courbet’s vaginal aperture to imagine a phenomenology of female pleasure in viewing the painting.35 While Dennis may be correct in arguing that women might desire the cunt represented within the frame of L’origine du monde, the performance of display that I have outlined suggests that this reconfigured standpoint requires the curatorship of a different kind of viewing experience through queer praxis. Nevertheless, Dennis’s argument offers a radical interpretation of why so many female and feminist artists have been so persistently fascinated with the legacy of L’origine du monde.36 Following Dennis’s queer curatorial lens, perhaps some of these artists work not out of revenge but out of desire. Or both. Like Dennis’s, James Lord’s response to Lacan’s erotic exhibitionism unveils the fragility and vulnerability of display choreographies dependent on patriarchal perspectivalism. For Dennis queer praxis consists of reading against the grain of the sexy or sexist scholarship on the painting, while for Lord one misstep revealed the failure of its intended trajectory and who and what it served.
Reorganizing the logic of erotic exhibitionism involves restructuring the embodied choreographies of the visual consumption of the female body that have become so integral to the economic superstructure of desire and possession. To change the structure of display—that is, the way we look, move, and feel in exhibitionary environments—requires a daring denaturalization of the ways of seeing that have shaped the commodity norms of capitalism, a queer choreography that critically examines the construction of heterosexuality and, in the case of Andrea Fraser’s Untitled, of heterosexual sex. While the project of reconfiguring how we see and consume sex in public has fueled the careers of many female performance artists, few works have taken such obvious and embodied risks.
Untitled
I’m not a person today. I’m an object in an art work.—Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights (2005)
Imagine this:
The year is 2004. You are a New Yorker visiting the Petzel Gallery in Chelsea. You enter into a scene furnished in the classic art gallery setup with walls awash in white. The room is completely bare save for one small white pedestal, sternum height, topped with a small, seemingly out-of-date television monitor. No wall text clutters the space or the visitor’s interaction with the sixty-minute film being shown on constant loop. You may have easily missed it, but the press release for the exhibition is stacked on the front room desk, ready to be taken into and out of the gallery and read by the patron, but not essentially part of the display. It reads:
“Untitled, 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission were to include a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited, sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting.
“Untitled is a continuation of Fraser’s twenty-year examination of the relationships between artists and their patrons. Known for her performances in the form of gallery tours and analyses of collecting by museums, corporate art institutions, and private collectors,Untitled shifts the focus of this investigation from the social and economic conditions of art to a much more personal terrain. The work raises issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange.”37
The story of L’origine du monde and its display environments showed how the meaning of an object is fashioned by staging not only that object but also the relationship between objects and bodies in space via a choreographed scene dependent on the logic of commodity capitalism. The curious tale of how the painting’s collectors consistently exhibited the painting as a sex object by cultivating its potential shock value speaks to how sexual commodity norms are formed and how these norms can be taken for granted and repeated in display spaces such as galleries and museums. By contrast, Andrea Fraser’s oeuvre consistently mimics the conventional choreographies that dominate the typical museum experience.
All Fraser’s performance art explicitly focuses on institutional critique or the practice of exposing the structure and logic of galleries as social fields that manage the circulation of ideas—and affect—through the adaptation and expectation of specific choreographies of sexual consumption normative to commodity capitalism. With an affective jolt, her work exemplifies and interrupts three kinds of emotional and physical rules for displaying, consuming, and interpreting objects. In Museum Highlights, she imitates the stock choreography of the typical museum tour to memorialize banal spaces and objects in the museum (e.g., a water fountain) that are not intended as sites of resonance or wonder but are nevertheless on display.38 In Little Frank and His Carp, she creates an erotic response to her aural reception of the museum audio guide to perform a literal embodiment and a sensual interpretation of the textured descriptions of art objects.39 While eroticism plays an important part in all of her work, Untitled took the greatest risks toward denaturalizing norms of sexual commodification through the execution of a performance that so closely imitates them as to question the boundary between mimicry and mimesis.
I want to suggest that in Untitled Fraser goes beyond institutional critique, that she also has a profound message to convey about the history of sexuality, especially as it intertwines with the history of collection, display, and the art market. She does so by making and displaying a work of art that like Courbet’s L’origine du monde lifts the veil on the sublime ideal and in so doing shows the repetition and return of psychic economies for managing female sexuality and the role of this disciplined female sexuality in the marketplace. What makes Untitled such an appropriate foil to the legacy of L’origine du monde is precisely this imposed proximity to the objet petit a that characterizes the history of sexual display (erotic exhibitionism) and Western traditions of collecting sex (hardcore collecting).40
More importantly, the response to Fraser’s work (I could call it backlash) illustrates how current capitalist modes of consumption depend on the paranoid staging of a static notion of heterosexuality and masculinist viewing practices. In the case of Untitled, Fraser became both the art object and the erotic exhibitionist who, in the end, was forbidden from using her art as a prosthetic phallus; the negative reception of her work consequently forced her to rethink the presentation of the piece in future exhibitions by removing its risk factor, which for her consisted of sexualized movement on film, from display. In Untitled, we encounter two scenarios of the slow reveal characteristic of erotic exhibitionism: the affirmation of (dominant) female sexuality carefully choreographed in the film and, in its critical aftermath, the tenacious persistence of masculine heterosexual desire as the privileged visual and choreographic stance for commodifying and consuming sex objects. It is the declaration of a dominant female sexuality, both in the film and in the social life of Fraser as the erotic exhibitionist beyond the frame, that compelled critics to reinscribe Untitled back into the masculine capitalist ways of seeing and consuming the female body thus far laid out in the display history of the passive female aperture represented by L’origine du monde.
Untitled is partly about performing the structure of relationships within the art field and within economic interrelationships broadly. In an interview with Gregg Bordowitz for Artwurl, a non-profit webzine of the PS122 Gallery, Fraser talked about the destabilizing potential of Untitled and her other emotionally charged performances such as Official Welcome, where she mimicked the hyperbolic rituals of opening addresses and, at one point, wept at the speaker’s podium.41 For Fraser and Bordowitz this potential lies in affect, “the excess of affect as well as what is excessive about affect itself.” For Fraser, unexpected feelings can emerge when a performer consciously hyperbolizes and mimics socialized scripts. These feelings can profoundly destabilize the spectator’s or participant observer’s ability to simply perform ritualistic roles (e.g., chin scratching in the museum, decorous applauding at the theater, or bidding at the art auction). In the case of Untitled, sex and nakedness are employed not to shock or scandalize but rather to put the work in conversation with a history of viewing the body read as white, female, and nude. In its explicitness, Untitled conjures the highly contested category of filmed sex and its proximity to the mass consumer genre of popular pornography. In this location, it inserts itself into a history of the avant-garde that, according to Žižek, uses sex for its shock value and posits perversion as a commodity to be displayed, desired, bought, and sold. But the film is also a parody of these earlier histories, one in which Fraser plays with the proximity to patriarchal perspectivalism and at the same time feminist performance art histories and their preoccupation with restaging and reconfiguring this trenchant gaze.
The critical reception of Untitled dismissed or overlooked this conscious procedural and prosex feminist move. Instead, the New York critic coterie preferred to freeze not only Untitled but also the artist Fraser into masculine-driven categories of artistic production. I want to interrupt that critical discourse and discuss Untitled as a work that exemplifies what Rebecca Schneider described as binary terror. Like the work of Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneeman, Annie Sprinkle, Ann Magnuson, Karen Finley, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Robbie McCauley, and the Spiderwoman Theater, among others, Untitled depicts the female performer as dialectical image, imagemaker, and image interpreter; she is the author of her body and her art through a friction created by countermemory, vigilant repetition, and the painful irruption of what Schneider called real stuff.42 This real stuff becomes the interstice of words and bodies that explosively renders the symbolic literal on and across the artist’s body. When combined with the performative repetition of countermemory that both comically and painfully mimics the masked structures of visibility, the literality of real stuff interrogates, interrupts, and disrupts the binary oppositions that dominate habits of seeing and comprehending the body marked as woman. The result is a “mess across a number of high holy divides” that combats the patriarchal and capitalist politics of anxiety-ridden desire that (still!) inhabit the perspectival frames for creating and evaluating art and the female body.43
Yet the examples provided by Schneider (with the exception of Annie Sprinkle’s live performance Public Cervix Announcement) seem tame in their lack of embodied interaction when compared to Untitled, a film that dangerously sits on the slash between high and low, avant-garde and perverse, erotic and pornographic. Even well-intentioned critics, such as Bordowitz, positioned Untitled within an association between the artist and the sex worker that goes all the way back to Baudelaire and Toulouse-Lautrec. While Fraser’s work can (and overwhelmingly was) read in direct connection to this legacy and particularly via the theoretical lexicon of commodity fetishism, the performance of the artist as laborer alienated from her work was not her primary goal. In speaking about her filmic persona in Untitled, Fraser distanced herself from the figure of the prostitute. She explained: “What I was doing in the hotel room was not selling myself but producing an artwork that I own.”44 Rather than performing as a john or a buyer, the collector was a collaborator who paid, as Fraser did, with his body. He, like Fraser, transformed the interaction of their bodies into the art object, but, unlike him, she was also the author of the piece from the planning of the artistic concept to the execution of the filmed performance. Perhaps it is not surprising that in Untitled Fraser is first to be seen removing his clothes, then her own, and taking the lead in the sexual encounter. Fraser, not him, not any man, was the erotic exhibitionist.
The reception of the piece revealed how the art criticism world continues to be dominated by the anxious paradigm of commodity capitalism as the framework for interpreting sexual display. The reaction to Untitled shows how sex functions as a tool and a metaphor for exploring the political economy of visuality. From a perverse preoccupation with the question, How much? (as in, how much did the collector pay her to participate?), to outright assertions that “Andrea Fraser is a whore,” talk about Untitled overwhelmingly missed the opportunity to critically discuss the risks taken by a feminist artist who dared to perform interactive sex while retaining the visual pleasure that the feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey so warned against.45 Critics also missed the opportunity to discuss Fraser’s unique combination of institutional analysis with the vulnerability, tenderness, and strangeness that, to my mind, no other of the institutional critique artists manages except for Adrian Piper.46
In what was perhaps the most demonstrative of reviews, Jerry Saltz simultaneously applauded Fraser’s conceptual savvy while commenting on her “attentive blowjob” and her “excellent shape for a 39-year-old.” He also described the sexual performance as one orchestrated by “the collector, co-artist, commissioner, John or whatever you want to call him.”47 If Fraser’s corpus could collectively be categorized under the question, What do we want from art? Saltz’s review, much like Du Camp’s account of seeing L’origine du monde, revealed more than perhaps he ever wanted it to. It also exhibited the persistence of a certain relationship between art, heterosexual sex, gender, collecting, and capitalism. When juxtaposed to L’origine du monde, Untitled gives us the whole woman; she is someone, and she does and will move with, for, and against her male collaborator.
My experience with the film was quite different from the critical response publicized online and in art magazines. It was also markedly different than the experience of the spectators in the Petzel Gallery in 2004. I visited the gallery in 2011. I watched the film on a flat-screen MAC monitor in a small room in the gallery’s main office while the Petzel staff and director went about their daily business. To me, the film seemed carefully choreographed and neatly organized into a clockworked configuration of twenty minutes of foreplay, twenty minutes of penetrative and oral sex, and twenty minutes of afterglow. While it was clear to me that the collector came, it was never clear if Fraser orgasmed, especially as the film is silent. In this way, Untitled provided an evocative example of the theory of “aural pleasure” and the status of the feminine outcry as the extravisual proof of female ejaculation so beautifully laid out by John Corbett and Terry Kapsalis.48 What was also clear throughout the film was that Fraser was the one in control: she seduced him; she undressed him well before she took even one article of clothing off of herself. The sex and afterglow portions were tender and well timed. As I watched, I could not help but think to myself: “This is a couple in love or at least comfortable with their intimacy.” The performance of intimacy ranged from laughing to penetration to reading each other’s palms and calmly discussing the mundane and banal details of everyday life (so it seemed). I was wondering throughout if a condom would be used. I did not see any or notice the act of putting one on, which left me to wonder about the conceptual import of this absence: in other words, this was not safe sex.
Watching the film in silence with my back to the door where staff members might enter without me noticing them seeing me intently watching the video transformed me, I felt, into the classic voyeur who does not want to be caught looking too long, too resolutely, or at all. I found that taking feverish notes had the effect of distancing myself from the object, if for no other reason than it kept my hands busy and warranted frequently looking away and back to the screen. I would be lying if I said I did not get aroused, but the most consistent affect I experienced was boredom. I frequently thought about other things. I texted a friend to make after-viewing plans. I thought about the other videos I wanted to see before I left the gallery that day or whether I needed to come back to watch them tomorrow. I wondered what time the gallery opened the next day and whether its schedule would fit into mine. Perhaps this too was an attempt on my part to displace my anxiety by performing, much like Lacan, the role of disinterested analyst (and, in so performing, protecting the phallus of my scholarly persona). The gallery possessed Untitled, but I performed the role of erotic exhibitionist who simultaneously viewed the video for the first time and orchestrated the technicalities of its semipublic display.
The only way to view Fraser’s films, especially Untitled, is to visit her office at the University of California, Los Angeles, or go to the Petzel Gallery by appointment (after being screened by the gallery director and making a verbal promise that you will not, under any circumstances, publicize Untitled as the documentation of prostitution).49 Even in subsequent exhibitions that might wish to include Untitled, it is unlikely that the original film will ever again be displayed. After Petzel, Fraser altered the format of Untitled and rendered a photo-documentation version of the film for an exhibition called Into Me/Out of Me curated by Klaus Biesenbach for PS1 in New York in 2006. The six stills that Fraser chose from Untitled are the only ones in the public domain. Each image represents a distilled moment in the narrative of the sixty-minute video. “The immediate motivation,” Fraser told me in personal correspondence, “was that Klaus was very insistent about having it in the show, and I was insistent about not wanting to go through showing the video again at that point.”50 The next time Fraser exhibited the photo version of Untitled was at the Tate Modern’s 2009 show Pop Life: Art in a Material World. In this exhibition, she decided to display looping film stills from Untitled. No doubt, these choices were influenced by the personal attacks made by New York’s elite art critic coterie.51 Like a dancer who wishes to save her energy in rehearsal, Fraser chose to represent narrative via photographic stills to mark time out of the more intricate choreography of the original film. She distilled the eroticism of the film into compressed movements and confined moments that stood in for long passages of choreography, but she lost the full-out kinesthesia, the precise positioning, and the emotion of the film. Her choice to replace an artistic form of movement with one of stasis underscores the relationship between movement, affect, and the performative dimension of display, especially when it comes to a history of reception for sexual movement as represented in film.52
In the case of Untitled and the choice to eradicate movement from subsequent exhibitions, Fraser must have believed that an absence of movement could manipulate the production and circulation of the response—namely, that her work was art, not porn, and that she was an artist, not a whore. By confining her viewing publics to only imagining the sexual performance that existed between the carefully selected still images that she chose to display for Tate audiences, her film becomes photography or a Powerpoint presentation. Like the body depicted in L’origine du monde, she does not move, the details of her empowered sexual choreography diminished by the rigidity of the static form. Ensuing iterations of Untitled thus became partial citations of the original copy. And, in this partial citation, the binary terror of Untitled is endangered.
This point brings me back to the proposal of a conception of choreography as one that accounts for a symbiotic performance of bodily movements and affective information in display spaces and specifically erotic exhibitionism as a repetitive performance that solidified heteronormative relationships between the viewer and the viewed. Andrea Fraser’s Untitled, the critical response (or the lack thereof), and the terms of our own engagement with the object illuminate the conditions under which certain kinds of institutionally specific choreographies are produced and repeated. Untitled circumvented the rules of affective engagement between bodies and objects in space by mimicking the choreographies we associate with, on the one hand, hetero sex and the history of patriarchal perspectivalism as exemplified in the provenance of L’origine du monde and the genre we know as hardcore pornography and, on the other hand, the counterhistory of avant-garde feminist performance art and the tradition labeled by Schneider as binary terror. Ultimately, Untitled falls short and goes beyond both genealogies. It challenges the spectator to consider the role of scripted feelings on the value and interpretation of art and the place of certain artist-laborers in the canon of what is considered avant-garde, erotic, or pornographic.
Economies of affect, movement, and visuality in museums play profound but neglected roles in understanding how value, taste, and the cutting edge are determined. Racialized gender as an embodied code and a lens for perceiving the cumulative value of an artist’s work determines the market value of explicitly sexual art. The hard-core collecting that I have described throughout this chapter in relation to both L’origine du monde and the larger art market that Fraser critiqued thrives on the stereotype of a masculine cultural producer and a feminine art object. The display and reception of Fraser’s performance in Untitled revealed how normative feelings about sex inform cultural norms and practices in museums and galleries that are at once personal and collective, contemporary and historically derived. In the instance of Fraser’s Untitled and its photographic revision at the Tate, they also affect what artists do with their bodies and their medium even before a piece gets to the stage of display.
The erotic exhibitionism of L’origine du monde and Fraser’s Untitled resulted in widely varying responses. The painting, while originally suspect, became widely desired and, despite its controversial beginning, took up a relatively unproblematic, prominent, and permanent position at a world-renowned fine arts museum in Paris. The film is excoriated and maligned, its intellectual stance on the entrenched market relation between artists and collectors is lost, and subsequent showings excise movement from its presentational qualities to avoid further backlash. These two examples and their juxtaposition demonstrate the history of sexual display as one marked by gendered structures of feelings and movements that are either integrated or marginalized within the market of collecting and displaying sex objects. Fraser attempted to disrupt conventional circuits of objects, art, and women’s sexual bodies to encourage a queer choreographic stance of viewership that unveiled the construction of patriarchal perspectivalism as deeply rooted in collecting, capitalism, and normative codes of display, but in the end the art world recontained her.