Laura Gascoigne
November/December 2018
It’s official: you can no longer walk into a room and say: “Hi guys!” In July Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey objected on Twitter that she is not a “guy” and doesn’t wish to be addressed as one, since when that mode of address – friendly, casual, non-committal – has been formally outlawed. An office-worker friend of my son received an email to that effect from his employers.
I don’t know about other Jackdaw readers, but if it’s a choice between “guys” and “dolls” I’m with the guys. Because there is now a choice, and it’s getting wider by the minute: the acronym ‘LGBT’ recently acquired an added + sign as the possible permutations are now so numerous that it seems discriminatory towards dyslexics to tack on more letters.
I realised how far we’d come when the black singer Gabrielle joked in an interview with Simon Hattenstone in August: “I’m coming back as a white male, honey,” and I took her literally. But it’s no use yearning for a simpler time when a tranny meant a white van and a white van man was accepted as a man on face value, no further examination necessary. Those days are past. Then people worried about STDs; now their most pressing anxiety is sexual IDs. No wonder they feel compelled to wear their sexuality on their sleeves, lapel badges, sweatbands, dog tags, wherever – or, in the case of artists, on their art.
Fifty years ago, when swinging sixties activist Caroline Coon painted large canvases of vaginas, they weren’t pretty. The poet Christopher Logue, who was given one (not in that sense necessarily) by the artist, was embarrassed to hang it and passed it on to my husband, who kept it in a cupboard before handing it back. But Coons wasn’t making a statement about her sexual identity, she was basically just letting it all hang out. Now the statements are getting personal, and the scale bigger.
Four years ago, the Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi made a kayak with a cockpit modelled on her own vagina and rewarded crowd-funders of the project with complimentary copies of 3D-printer data allowing them to reproduce the work. Igarashi, who describes herself as a ‘decorative vagina artist’, was amused and somewhat flattered when ten policemen turned up to arrest her. After a complex legal battle during which the nation that invented the shunga print struggled to define obscenity she was eventually released, only to be rearrested six months later. In modern Japan, apparently, a woman can’t model her own canoe. Fortunately here in Britain our police force is so enfeebled that it can no longer get it up for obscenity charges, so when Leeds art student Jenna Tilley installed a wall of multicoloured Plasticine labia in her graduation show last summer the local constabulary turned a blind eye. True, her flower arrangement was unexciting; Constance Spry would have done a better job.
But here’s a strange thing. You would think, wouldn’t you, that in these enlightened times when Courbet’s Origin of the World is censored by Facebook, pussies would be off limits to male artists, but no: everything is now up for grabs. In 2015 when Anish Kapoor installed his 60 x 10m rusted flower titled Dirty Corner on the lawns at Versailles and announced that it represented “the vagina of the queen”, vandals inevitably reached for the spray cans – well, it was asking for it – but they turned out to be anti-Semites, not feminists. Jonathan Jones even went so far as to compliment Kapoor in the Guardian on seeming “much more interested in vaginas than he is in penises, which is rare and commendable in a modern male artist” – an interest attributed to “his desire to imagine the body from within and open our imagination to the mystery of being”. Actually this interest is not so rare in modern male artists. JJ would presumably also have approved of Jamie McCartney’s The Great Wall of Vagina, constructed that same year from plaster casts of 400 vulvas with the commendable aim of promoting “freedom from genital anxiety”.
While British artists get in touch with their feminine insides, it has been left to Russia to keep the male end up. In 2010 the guerilla art collective Voina spray-painted a 65m phallus, Penis in FSB Captivity, on the underside of a drawbridge facing the Federal Security Service’s offices in St Petersburg. Astonishingly, it was nominated for a prize by Moscow’s National Centre of Contemporary Arts. Less astonishingly, despite being renamed Member in FSB Captivity at the Culture Ministry’s request it was eventually withdrawn from competition. The FSB doesn’t need lessons from artists in standing up for Mother Russia. But Russia is not the last redoubt of unreconstructed artistic masculinity: there is also Australia, where ‘the world’s only penis painter’ Tim Patch, aka Pricasso, has taken Renoir literally and made a career of painting with his prick. Unlike Renoir he does not use his tool to conjure titillating visions of sun-dappled nudes: in a live appearance in 2016 on ITV’s This Morning he wasted his creative energies on a double portrait of Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.
Though technically impressive, Patch’s effort was nowhere near as striking as the tachiste effects achieved by the paint-filled Plop Eggs hatched from Swiss artist Milo Moiré’s snatch at Art Cologne in 2014. (You can watch it on YouTube, if you’re old enough.) In this artistic battle of the sexes the girls are on top and, unlike the empathetic Kapoor, they’re taking advantage. Their depictions of the male organ are unchivalrous – instead of magnifying their subject, they belittle it. Look at their disrespectful treatment of Donald Trump. It was bad enough when Illma Gore’s nude portrait Make America Great Again (2016) gave the wannabe POTUS a teeny weiner, but imagine the germophobe pussygrabber’s horror at seeing himself immortalised in menstrual blood by Sarah Levy in her portrait, Whatever (2016) – a startlingly good likeness, especially the flesh tones.
Even when inflating male endowments, women artists don’t flatter them. When Canadian ‘art-pop provocateur’ Peaches climbed into an 11m penis-shaped windsock and crowd-surfed the audience at Glasgow’s SWG3 in 2016 during a rendition of her anthem, Dick in the Air, I’m not sure it was entirely complimentary. That said, actress Kate Beckinsale did look very lovely inside the inflatable penis she donned for an Instagram picture posted that year with the caption: “Just a girl trying to make it in a man’s world.”
How confusing it all is. Perhaps it will become clearer in Nottingham Contemporary’s autumn exhibition Still I Rise, which promises to apply “a gendered perspective, grounded in intersectional, queer and feminist thinking” to the problem. Or perhaps not. I can’t help sympathising with the Liverpool ReSisters responsible for the rash of stickers reading ‘Women don’t have penises’ that appeared in August on the knobs of Gormley’s iron avatars on Crosby Beach (illustration). Needless to say, their protest against proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act allowing guys to ‘self-identify’ as dolls unleashed a torrent of accusations of trans-phobia. All the poor girls wanted was some certainty in an uncertain world, but in matters of sexual identity nothing is certain – not while we’re on this gender-bender, anyway. Let’s hope it doesn’t leave us with a splitting headache.
Laura Gascoigne: We’re on a Gender Bender – November 2018
Laura Gascoigne
November/December 2018
It’s official: you can no longer walk into a room and say: “Hi guys!” In July Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey objected on Twitter that she is not a “guy” and doesn’t wish to be addressed as one, since when that mode of address – friendly, casual, non-committal – has been formally outlawed. An office-worker friend of my son received an email to that effect from his employers.
I don’t know about other Jackdaw readers, but if it’s a choice between “guys” and “dolls” I’m with the guys. Because there is now a choice, and it’s getting wider by the minute: the acronym ‘LGBT’ recently acquired an added + sign as the possible permutations are now so numerous that it seems discriminatory towards dyslexics to tack on more letters.
I realised how far we’d come when the black singer Gabrielle joked in an interview with Simon Hattenstone in August: “I’m coming back as a white male, honey,” and I took her literally. But it’s no use yearning for a simpler time when a tranny meant a white van and a white van man was accepted as a man on face value, no further examination necessary. Those days are past. Then people worried about STDs; now their most pressing anxiety is sexual IDs. No wonder they feel compelled to wear their sexuality on their sleeves, lapel badges, sweatbands, dog tags, wherever – or, in the case of artists, on their art.
Fifty years ago, when swinging sixties activist Caroline Coon painted large canvases of vaginas, they weren’t pretty. The poet Christopher Logue, who was given one (not in that sense necessarily) by the artist, was embarrassed to hang it and passed it on to my husband, who kept it in a cupboard before handing it back. But Coons wasn’t making a statement about her sexual identity, she was basically just letting it all hang out. Now the statements are getting personal, and the scale bigger.
Four years ago, the Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi made a kayak with a cockpit modelled on her own vagina and rewarded crowd-funders of the project with complimentary copies of 3D-printer data allowing them to reproduce the work. Igarashi, who describes herself as a ‘decorative vagina artist’, was amused and somewhat flattered when ten policemen turned up to arrest her. After a complex legal battle during which the nation that invented the shunga print struggled to define obscenity she was eventually released, only to be rearrested six months later. In modern Japan, apparently, a woman can’t model her own canoe. Fortunately here in Britain our police force is so enfeebled that it can no longer get it up for obscenity charges, so when Leeds art student Jenna Tilley installed a wall of multicoloured Plasticine labia in her graduation show last summer the local constabulary turned a blind eye. True, her flower arrangement was unexciting; Constance Spry would have done a better job.
But here’s a strange thing. You would think, wouldn’t you, that in these enlightened times when Courbet’s Origin of the World is censored by Facebook, pussies would be off limits to male artists, but no: everything is now up for grabs. In 2015 when Anish Kapoor installed his 60 x 10m rusted flower titled Dirty Corner on the lawns at Versailles and announced that it represented “the vagina of the queen”, vandals inevitably reached for the spray cans – well, it was asking for it – but they turned out to be anti-Semites, not feminists. Jonathan Jones even went so far as to compliment Kapoor in the Guardian on seeming “much more interested in vaginas than he is in penises, which is rare and commendable in a modern male artist” – an interest attributed to “his desire to imagine the body from within and open our imagination to the mystery of being”. Actually this interest is not so rare in modern male artists. JJ would presumably also have approved of Jamie McCartney’s The Great Wall of Vagina, constructed that same year from plaster casts of 400 vulvas with the commendable aim of promoting “freedom from genital anxiety”.
While British artists get in touch with their feminine insides, it has been left to Russia to keep the male end up. In 2010 the guerilla art collective Voina spray-painted a 65m phallus, Penis in FSB Captivity, on the underside of a drawbridge facing the Federal Security Service’s offices in St Petersburg. Astonishingly, it was nominated for a prize by Moscow’s National Centre of Contemporary Arts. Less astonishingly, despite being renamed Member in FSB Captivity at the Culture Ministry’s request it was eventually withdrawn from competition. The FSB doesn’t need lessons from artists in standing up for Mother Russia. But Russia is not the last redoubt of unreconstructed artistic masculinity: there is also Australia, where ‘the world’s only penis painter’ Tim Patch, aka Pricasso, has taken Renoir literally and made a career of painting with his prick. Unlike Renoir he does not use his tool to conjure titillating visions of sun-dappled nudes: in a live appearance in 2016 on ITV’s This Morning he wasted his creative energies on a double portrait of Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.
Though technically impressive, Patch’s effort was nowhere near as striking as the tachiste effects achieved by the paint-filled Plop Eggs hatched from Swiss artist Milo Moiré’s snatch at Art Cologne in 2014. (You can watch it on YouTube, if you’re old enough.) In this artistic battle of the sexes the girls are on top and, unlike the empathetic Kapoor, they’re taking advantage. Their depictions of the male organ are unchivalrous – instead of magnifying their subject, they belittle it. Look at their disrespectful treatment of Donald Trump. It was bad enough when Illma Gore’s nude portrait Make America Great Again (2016) gave the wannabe POTUS a teeny weiner, but imagine the germophobe pussygrabber’s horror at seeing himself immortalised in menstrual blood by Sarah Levy in her portrait, Whatever (2016) – a startlingly good likeness, especially the flesh tones.
Even when inflating male endowments, women artists don’t flatter them. When Canadian ‘art-pop provocateur’ Peaches climbed into an 11m penis-shaped windsock and crowd-surfed the audience at Glasgow’s SWG3 in 2016 during a rendition of her anthem, Dick in the Air, I’m not sure it was entirely complimentary. That said, actress Kate Beckinsale did look very lovely inside the inflatable penis she donned for an Instagram picture posted that year with the caption: “Just a girl trying to make it in a man’s world.”
How confusing it all is. Perhaps it will become clearer in Nottingham Contemporary’s autumn exhibition Still I Rise, which promises to apply “a gendered perspective, grounded in intersectional, queer and feminist thinking” to the problem. Or perhaps not. I can’t help sympathising with the Liverpool ReSisters responsible for the rash of stickers reading ‘Women don’t have penises’ that appeared in August on the knobs of Gormley’s iron avatars on Crosby Beach (illustration). Needless to say, their protest against proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act allowing guys to ‘self-identify’ as dolls unleashed a torrent of accusations of trans-phobia. All the poor girls wanted was some certainty in an uncertain world, but in matters of sexual identity nothing is certain – not while we’re on this gender-bender, anyway. Let’s hope it doesn’t leave us with a splitting headache.
Share: