“The simple gesture of turning a camera towards a woman has become equivalent to a terrorist act.”
This 1981 quote from feminist film scholar Mary Ann Doane captured her frustrations with the objectification and violence which seemed to follow every woman’s portrayal in cinematic narrative. Her polemic observations carry into the world of fine art and photography as well; does representing the female form immediately invite a prurient gaze?
Untitled: Siluetas, the enduring series of work by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, and X Rated, a series by Belgian-Moroccan fashion photographer Mous Lambrabat, both manage to liberate the subject from its form. Their work shares in the achievement depicting the body without flesh, and the resulting images are ablaze with an eroticism that goes much deeper than skin.
In Siluetas, Mendieta uses natural elements — sand, fire, plant matter — to cast her body into the earth from which it came. As a female artist interested in self-portraiture, whenever I paint my body I feel chained to representation, and subsequently, objectification by the viewer. Even if I wish to convey an emotion, I must navigate the semiotics of my flesh, which will code for woman, sex. But Mendieta’s silhouette aflame in a pyre captures a tortured and primordial pain without the sexual burdens that come with depicting feminine flesh.
Mendieta was speculated to have been in an abusive relationship, and eventually faced her death, at the hands of her husband artist Carl Andre. Sexual violence was a frequent theme in her work. How do you portray abuse to the female body without depicting the female body being abused, which would be another abuse in itself? Her silhouettes capture a human figure bleeding colour, stained onto the ground, discarded or on fire; a voodoo doll vessel for her suffering.
Mous Lambrat, a Moroccan photographer who has lent his eye to institutions like Vogue Italia, also affords his human subjects a soulful ambiguity in his tongue-in-cheek-named series X Rated. Using a full-body veil, he transforms his subjects into glowing, ethereal figures.
Marco Biagni’s popular series High Visibility Burqa (2015) conveys the ironies of the burqa-wearer: in an attempt at modesty, she ultimately draws the most attention to herself as a visually illegible and politically charged symbol. But in X-Rated, the burqa-wearing woman is liberated from not only the trappings of the female body, but the political trappings of the burqa in the paranoid Western psyche. Perched imposingly atop desert dunes, X Rated conveys the dignity that comes with mystery. The veiled body reflects light and undulates, emanating a regal aura.
If pointing the camera at a woman is indeed a terrorist act, Mendieta and Lamrabat terrorize the viewer back. Mendieta’s effigies conjure the eternally tortured feminine; a deeply entrancing and unsettling call to reckon with the consequences of violence. And Lamrabat’s cloaked women, whose gaze is unseen but felt, are at once menacing and gorgeous. Both subvert violence against the female body into images that hold arresting power and alive-ness.
In his book Mysticism, philosopher Simon Critchley writes of a concept called negative theology: a proximity to godliness defined and made holy by its lack of definition. God is unknowable, so the less you know, the closer you are to God; in other words, the magic of unknowing. Mendieta and Lamrabat’s treatment of the female silhouette carry this apophatic ethos; their lack of definition renders it transcendent and supernatural.
Milena Pappalardo is a writer and artist based in Toronto and Montreal. She completed her Hon. Bachelor in Political Science at the University of Toronto. She loves to write about the political and psychoanalytic undercurrents of fashion, art and culture.