[This image is from Sandys' artist website:http://www.edwinasandys.com/]
This Image
which Is Not One: Edwina Sandys’ Christa
(1975)
“So woman
has not yet taken (a) place.”[1]
“The visual
is essentially pornographic…”[2]
“There is an expression in French: sage comme une image, literally, ‘wise
as an image.’ But the wisdom of the image, if it is indeed a kind of restraint,
is also the tension of an impetus or impulse. It is first offered and given to
be taken. The seduction of images, their eroticism, is nothing other than their
availability for being taken, touched by the eyes, the hands, the belly, or by
reason, and penetrated.”[3]
Since its first showing in 1975, Edwina
Sandys’ bronze sculpture Christa has
provoked polarized critique. Christa now
resides permanently at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New
York City, but she has traveled extensively, with showings in London, Rome,
Toronto, Washington, Kansas City, and at Yale and other universities. When she
finally came to rest at St John the Divine, during Holy Week in 1984, The Very
Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral and organizer of the
exhibit, recalled that, “All hell broke loose. The press was there, films were being
made of Christa all day. The news hit Rome on Easter Day: ‘Episcopal Cathedral
in New York has female Christ.’ That went over really swimmingly at the
Vatican. I was fascinated by the amount of strong opinion for or against.
Nothing was lukewarm.”[4]
Dean Morton’s own strong positive opinion of Christa was that “Christa
simply reminded viewers that women as well as men are called upon to share the
suffering of Christ.” For those who embrace Christa,
her example is a learning experience, a challenge to prejudice and oppression
within the Church and the world. She performs what could be called a
postmodern critique of devotional viewership, arguing for inclusivity as well
as disrupting the patriarchal history of both Christology and soteriology by
positing that the material contents of these theologies (male bodies, and the
absence of female ones) reinforce their sexist histories. She represents a historical revisionist approach to Christology,
especially—one that exposes the sexist roots of a church’s normative history
that has been used to reinforce such gendered norms that work to exclude women
from leadership.
On the other hand, there are those
critics who question Christa’s
effectiveness. One criticism is that rather than disrupting the assumptions of
devotional viewership within the Christian tradition, Christa may in fact serve to re-entrench herself within a history
of religious art and secular viewership that simply privileges the male gaze.
Margaret Miles, in the last chapter of her Carnal
Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West,
argues that a traditional image of Christ in the form of a female nude invites
a traditional male gaze that would persist in seeing erotic provocation rather
than suffering victim.[5]
Similarly Carter Heyward warns against
glorifying women's suffering or interpreting Christa merely as perpetual victim, though she may become "a
symbol of our predicament, including our need for liberation."[6]
Along with Miles, critic Jerry Myers asks, “Is it not…nearly impossible
even in this historic context of redemptive suffering to expose the nude female
body without inviting phallic prejudice?” Even these critics who sympathize
with Christa’s politics are wary of
this artistic method of reinterpretation of the traditional crucifixion figure.
Either side of this approach—whether Christa reminds of the human suffering of Christ that is lived in
women as well as men, or whether Christa
simply revisits the violence of the past again upon the bodies of women—misses
something striking about this sculpture. The objection that exposing the female
nude invites “phallic prejudice” is itself a violation, akin to any accusation
that women (or any other non-normative gendered or even non-gendered body, for
that manner), in their dress, walk, or any manner of being, somehow invite
sexual violence (no difference whether that’s a cat-call or rape). On these
grounds, it would be easy to dismiss Myers’ criticism as thoughtless, and the
fact that he bases it on Margaret Miles’ own critique is far more telling of
the depth to which such circuitous “blaming the victim” thought can reach. (And
another thing to keep in mind is that I am picking up this conversation about Christa where it left off in 1990 or so,
and a lot has changed in the rhetoric of women’s and gender studies in these past
twenty years. I doubt that either Miles or Meyers would make this same kind of
statement about Christa today.) However,
their discomfort with Christa’s image
also begs the question of the possibility of re-interpretation. Is it possible
to wrest an image away from its own history and appropriate it for another use?
On the other hand, the praise for Christa
that she reminds people that women “are Christ too” is similarly problematic.
Rhetorically, the sculpture asks the viewer to see women in Christ, and to see
Christ in women. Women suffer, just as men suffer. The suggestion Dean Morton
seems to be making is that suffering is a kind of equalizer, functioning
syllogistically something like: women suffer; men suffer; therefore, women are
equal to men. However, this is simply not the case. Shared suffering is not
equal suffering. While both criticisms had their time and place, re-visiting Christa right now can help us re-think
both spectatorship and specularity regarding both literal and abstract
representations of the bodies of women and Others. What’s interesting about the
above criticisms is that they take for granted that the main focus of the
interaction between the sculpture and its audience is the viewership of the
gazer--spectatorship. However, what Christa
may invite today is a reversal of this model. She is an instance of a certain
kind of display that performs its own specularity.
“Specularity” is a term used in the computer graphics world to
talk about the size and quality of reflections in rendering the illusion of
three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. I would like to capture this
word for another use. Here, I will use specularity to mean the process by which
something becomes seen, becomes able to be seen, or allows itself to be seen.
This notion of specularity presupposes a certain kind of agency on the part of
the object seen or observed (acknowledging the paradox of the life of things).
It allows that what we see is not necessarily what we know, and that the
essence of or knowledge of things may elude us even when we think we’re seeing
them straight. Briefly, “specularity” speaks to the performative agency of both
subjects and objects. To ask about Christa’s specularity means asking how
she herself presents herself, and whether this is a performance to which anyone
and everyone is invited. Christa uses quotation and mimesis—she is an imitation
of Christ, and a reference to a historical Christ. But at the same time, she
reflects back on an image that does not really exist: the female Christ.[7] In
this way, the quotation is not really a quotation, and the imitation is an
imitation of ---? Assuming this impossibility grounds the reasoning behind the
denial of women to the priesthood in Roman Catholic Church according to
apostolic succession (and to certain roles in other traditions as well), that
women are simply unable to perform as priests because their female bodies do
not allow them to literally inhabit this role. Paradoxically, even though women
would have to really stretch the art of imitation, the Church allows only those
bodies that can effect a “true imitation” to act as priests. So can a female
Christ really speak the reality of the crucifixion to believers? The reality of
the life of Christ? The reality of Christian belief and experience? Christa presents an image that exposes
the mimetic quality of any image. She quotes a history of viewership and
devotion, without offering anything solid. If anything, she is composed
entirely of quotation. Mimesis is both her form and content. This is as true of
the figure as “woman” as it is of it as “Christ.” Sandys herself recalls that the idea for the sculpture came to her in a
flash; she used no model, she made no sketches. “I used my own hands and feet,
and an imaginary face. I made it in clay. It took me three days to complete. It
was largely a subconscious act on my part.”[8]
Sandys gave a woman’s form to Christa, but she refers to no particular woman,
just as the Christ of Christa refers to no particular Christ. Christa’s specularity is all mimesis,
absent of referentiality.
In Unmaking
Mimesis Ellen Diamond proposes that
A feminist mimesis,
if there is such a thing, would take the relation to the real as productive,
not referential, geared to change, not to reproducing the same. It would explore the tendency to tyrannical
modeling (subjective/ideological projections masquerading as universal truths),
even in its own operations. Finally, it
would clarify the humanist sedimentation in the concept as a means of releasing
the historical particularity and transgressive corporeality of the mimos, who, in mimesis, is always more
and different than she seems.[9]
Diamond’s reconfiguration of mimesis as productive of reality rather
than referential charts a clear path out of what she calls the “hysteria” of
realism, which presents “symptoms” to the audience to be read and diagnosed.[10]
Rather than searching for the clues to the truth of representation, she remakes
mimesis into the active relationship between performance and its social and
political context. My purpose here is to ask, what if the reality that mimesis
seeks to produce is the absence of a certain kind of thing, such as a woman, or
the agency of the subaltern? What do we imitate when we want to represent the
impossibility of the agency of a thing that has never had subjectivity? Can
specularity be the agency of the thing that has no subjectivity? This is truly
an aporia. There is no bridge between the non-existence of the subaltern and
the agency of the subaltern, which is why Gayatri Spivak famously wrote, her
words still ringing, “The subaltern cannot speak.”[11]
This is a performative statement; it performs the failure of Bhaduri’s suicide
to register as the sovereign speech act it was; the only thing that can then be
said is that her act did not and could not speak. There is no way to say again
what Bhaduri attempted, because her specularity was not read in any way that
she could control.
Similarly, there is no way to speak what Christa
“says.” That Christ is woman, a woman, that women are in Christ, are
Christ—these arguments can be discerned in the sculpture. Its mimetic function,
as with Diamond’s feminist mimesis, produces what many would consider a better
reality. And yet that is not the end of the story. In Christa’s case, the
production of a new reality comes from an empty place. In imitating Christ,
Christa exposes the lack of precedent for her. Christa is not a synthesis; in
order for her to be a synthesis, and therefore productive of a new reality,
there would have to have already been some other reality for her to re-make.
But she’s referring back to the impossibility and the absence of the female Christ.
If I remember from my grade-school multiplication tables, if one multiplies a
positive (male Christ) with a negative (impossibility and absence of the Other,
the female), the outcome is yet another negative (an impossible female Christ).
This seems to be returning to the disturbing question that Myers and Miles
posed when Christa first came on the scene: can such an image not help but
invite phallic prejudice? Jill Dolan asks a similar question in Presence and Desire: “Can we really
construct ‘new’ images, or can we only wrest new meanings from old ones?”[12]
The issue here is whether any subject has the means of control of the
interpretation of their own specularity, to control when, if, how, and what
others see. To maintain this kind of control necessitates certain power and
status, certainly. For many women the world over (or, as I believe, for all
non-normative Others whether they are gendered female or not), the answer is no—no,
you do not have control. You will be seen and you will be made of what the
gazer wills. The only way to exert any control is to not offer an image, or to
offer an image which is not one.
Dolan furthers her discussion of the control of visual
meaning by quoting Jon Erickson: “You must transgress, that is trespass, across
those boundaries separating what is yours from what is theirs. I make it mine,
so the effectiveness that your meaning gives to it is devalued. This doubleness
is at the core of both parody and travesty: the ridicule of authority.”[13]
Christa, as mimetic of traditional
Christian art and the crucifix, likewise plays between doubleness and parody,
and is the essence of drag: to perform a gendered presence while denying an
audience the satisfaction of assured definition, erotically and perhaps
somewhat masochistically holding at bay any consummation of realist “truth.”
She too trespasses into the territory of the other’s property and appropriates
it for her own use. But in doing so she presents an image that has none of the
hilarity of the drag king’s smirk. Drag to some degree synthesizes multiple
realms of the real, especially the material realities of certain sexualities
(it is also more complex than that, but I think that’s another paper), whereas Christa cannot be a synthesis because
she is only drawing from one set: the thesis, the male. Female, in this case,
is not anti-thesis (which would mean a force or a reality of comparable import
to the thesis), but no thesis.
What perhaps makes Christa so disconcerting for her
critics is that she is an image of nothing to see: mimos with nothing to mime, a realistic image that cannot be
resolved in the logic of reference. If Christian iconic art reverences the
referral back to the body of Christ, then Christa
irreverently escapes all reference. She does not reverence reference! In
looking at Christa, we look into the
hole of woman’s signification of herself, which is “signifying nothing.” As
with female genital experience described by Luce Irigary,
…[H]er sexual organ
represents the horror of nothing to see. A defect in this systematic of
representation and desire. A ‘hole’ in its coptophilic lens. It is already
evident in Greek statuary that this nothing-to-see has to be excluded,
rejected, from such a scene of representation. Women’s genitals are simply
absent, masked, sewn back up inside their ‘crack.’
This
organ which has nothing to show for itself also lacks a form of its own. And if
a woman takes pleasure precisely from this incompleteness of form which allows
her organ to touch itself over and over again, indefinitely, by itself, that
pleasure is denied by a civilization that privileges phallomorphism.[14]
But where Irigary sees the nothingness of women’s signification as an
imposition from phallogocentric society, I wonder if not showing anything, if
being nothing to see, is the kind of control over specularity that is its most
powerful. On a material level, Christa
is a bronze statue on a plexiglass cross. Viewers will interpret her as they
will—feminine, masculine, liberating, blasphemous. But in exhibiting herself Christa makes abundantly clear
what is missing, what is not there to be seen: a feminine image of the divine
that is not only tolerated but seen as normal. There is simply no such thing in
Christian society. Female saints (the Virgin Mary the paragon example) and
their cults are always endorsed with a caveat: they are intercessors to God,
but not God. The thing that Christa plays with in the game of realistic
representation is an image of a female Christ. But there is no such thing. She
effectively offers of an image of nothing. Her specularity is one of
over-exposure to the point of blindness. Critics will continue to toil away at
the politics of what she represents, but then the joke is on us. She offers no
such thing, no representation.
There is danger
here, too, of the glorification of suicide and self-imposed silent suffering.
By suggesting that specularity is out of our control lest we offer images that
are not ones (an impossibility!), I am trying to speak to the fact that some
subjectivities are not ones. Where one assumes subjectivity, objects may reside.
Bhaduri’s suicide was an act of furious desperation, not a romantic gesture of
despair. Going back to the “blaming the victim” example, perhaps it can be
expressed like this: when an accusation is lobbied at any subaltern (If you
don’t want to be homeless, why don’t you get a job? If you don’t want to be
whistled at/insulted/discriminated against why do you walk like that, look like
that, be like that?) it
simultaneously objectifies the person while demanding that this person behave
like a subject. That’s like locking me in a cell and telling me to be free, and
degrades the very idea of freedom.
The argument I’m
trying to make is of course impossible. Taking it down to brass tacks, what I’m
trying to do here is argue that when we look at something we are actually
looking at nothing, which goes against all good reason and sense. Whether or
not it’s possible, I feel this attempt is an important gesture to make. At the
heart of it lies a thought very similar to Jean-Luc Nancy’s configuration of
representation as absence:
[R]epresentation not only presents
something that, either by rights or in point of fact, is simply absent: in
truth, it presents what is absent from presence pure and simple, its being as such or even its sense or truth. It
is on this point that confusions, paradoxes, and contradictions often come to
be formed. In the absence that constitutes the fundamental characteristic or
represented presence, the absence of the thing (thought as the original, the
only valid and real presence) intersects with the absence that exists at the
very level of the thing isolated within its immediacy; that is, it
intersects with what I have already called absense,
or sense inasmuch as it is precisely not a thing.[15]
Nancy highlights the gap, the aporia, between the absence of the thing
represented and the thing that represents it. He’s speaking about the interplay
between images and objects, or images and persons, or images and ideas. When
representations exist at the same level of the original “thing isolated within
its immediacy,” they blur the distinction between representation and reality.
But still, Nancy is working within the economy of referentiality, whereas what Christa may help us think is a
representation that escapes the system or the economy of the sign, that
functions significantly without the intercession of a master signifier. We
don’t see Christa; we only see
everything she is not. This is the power behind her image, that she yanks the
logic of representation and mimesis away from the viewer. Hers is an image that
is not one.
[1]
Luce Irigaray. Speculum of the Other
Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)
227.
[2]Frederick
Jameson. Signatures of the Visible (New
York: Routledge, 1992) 1. Italics original.
[3]
Jean-Luc Nancy. The Ground of the Image.
Trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 10.
[4]
Caroline Seebohm. Edwina Sandys: Art (online book, http://www.edwinasandys.com/filter/books#/Edwina-Sandys-Art) 15.
[5]
Margaret Miles. Carnal
Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston:
Beacon, 1989) 177, 179.
[6]
Carter Heyward. Touching Our Strength:
the Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1989).
[7]
However, the image of the female crucified certainly has a long hagiographic
history. In medieval art, Bosch’s triptych of St Julia the martyr being
crucified places the female figure at the altar’s center in a scene that would
have traditionally shown Christ. For an encompassing study of the female
crucifix in religious art history, see Ilse E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier
University Press, 2001).
[8]
Seebohm 15.
[9]
Elin Diamond. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on
Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1997) xvi.
[10]
Diamond 25-32.
[11]
Gayatri Spivak. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
[12]
Jill Dolan Presence and Desire: Essays on
Gender, Sexuality, and Performance
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) 180
[13]
Dolan 183.
[14]
Luce Irigaray. This Sex Which Is Not One,
trans Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985) 26.
[15]
Nancy 36.
