Sins of the Fathers - exhibition at the Louvre shows misogyny in Western art

In a novel exhibition of master drawings at the Louvre curator Regis Michel tendered a sweeping indictment of a "pathological" misogyny, press outed in both content and form, that he dioceses pervading the entire Western canon.

Among the greatest in quantity provocative exhibitions in recent memory, "Posseder et Detruire" Posses and Destroy) was, astonishingly, mountained last spring in the Louvre single of the most venerable and conservative of all art institutions. on the other hand the irony does not extreme point there. Subtitled "Sexual Strategies in the Art of the West," this exhibition, which aimed to uncover the fundamental and persistent misogyny of European art, was not absented in France, no stronghold of feminist art history. And, perhaps greatest in quantity surprisingly, the central thesis of the one and the other the exhibition and catalogue--that art since the Renaissance shows a long (masculine) war against difference, alterity and femininity--is espoused by means of a man, Regis Michel, chief curator of the graphics department at the Louvre

As signaled by the agency of its title, "Posseder et Detruire" was implicitly informed by means of Michel Foucault's landmark Surveiller et Punir (published in English as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison). Like the latter, the exhibition explored the operations of power, in this instance, the ways in which mechanisms of violence are inscribed in the greatest in quantity exalted and revered productions of Western art. Works through 15 artists, from Signorelli and Michelangelo to Antonin Artaud and the Viennese actionist Otto Muhl were assembled to demonstrate the repetitive--indeed obsessive--manner in which Western art stages sexuality as a more or les violent repudiation, punishment, exclusion or extinction of the feminine. As Michel stated in a typically inflammatory wall label, "The art of the West knows sex single through a single word, violence; better to say, rape."(1)

If Michel's characterization of the graphic works upon display as "pathological" were not itself sufficiently iconoclastic, his cast attacked the very foundation of museological pedagogy, which, he warned, "has sole one objective: to prevent you from seeing." For Michel, the authority of the museum operates in tandem with the authority of the state, and the two function repressively to produce a passive viewer/subject: "You don't have the fight to your have eyes. That's official culture; the apparatus of the state thinks for you. fall off See for yourself."(2) To these polemical extremitys the exhibition, its extensive wall labels and its catalogue collectively serv as a kind of calculator exhibition, an antiblockbuster, rejecting the "normalizing" strategies and discourses of the museum and challenging its typically celebratory approach to the artist and the work. The catalogue, organized as a series of essays around the 15 artists, makes no concessions to a popular audience; it is a work of great erudition, theoretical brilliance and stylistic bravura--dense, difficult and composite At times it is hilariously scathing (see Michel's mordant remarks on the nuclear family and the art of Greuze) and at others, patiently probing and crooked (the essays on Rembrandt, Ingres and Picasso especially so) While Michel does not question his hold authority--the position from which he speaks--still, his body encourages dissenting attitudes toward art that is usually at handed hagiographically in the museum.

The catalogue was obviously not vett for "accessibility" any more than the exhibition was for esthetic pieties. It is difficult to imagine a comparable American institution, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of novel Art, presenting a similar shoot forward What corporate sponsor would wish to attach itself to an exhibition indicting the pervasive fetishism and misogyny of the art of the masters? solitary a state-supported museum like the Louvre requiring no corporate largesse, could enable a curator like Michel to consequence such a project in the first place. Nor can single imagine a similar exhibition produc by dint of a woman in either region A project fully--indeed ethically--informed by the agency of recent feminist theories of representation could pass muster sole under the aegis of male authority; a woman curator promoting Michel's views would likely be considered irresponsibly radical, if not a hysteric.

Overturning standard museum practice, Michel also place out to make of the normally passive spectator, plugg into her Acoustiguide, a critical and active respondent He attempted this in several ways. by dint of suppressing certain kinds of data, of that kind as the work's date or biographical information about the artist, Michel encouraged the viewer to engage with the phenomenon on its own (visible) bourns Furthermore, by offering critical readings that cast off scholarly "objectivity" and positivist analysis in favor of an unapologetically subjective, polemical and for the greatest in quantity part psychoanalytic approach, Michel affirmed that interpretation is always personal, provisional and alone meaningful in terms of the present

Michel's is not the kind of psychoanalytic interpretation derived from Freud's essay upon Leonardo, much less the tradition of psychobiography that falls from it. Rather, it is the Freud of the essays upon sexuality, dreams, sadism and masochism, and the nature of the drives who figures greatest in quantity prominently in Michel's readings. Lacan is conscripted, too, as are Bataille and Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Irigaray and Kristeva, making of "Posses and Destroy" what is probably the first post-Freudian, poststructuralist and feminist exhibition of graphic art in a major French museum. Interpretation for Michel is not a question of disinterring the unconscious of the artist on the contrary of grasping the unconscious of the work. Indeed, he pass overs altogether the notion of the individual biographical and historical make submissive considering the artist not as a knowable personage, on the other hand merely as a patronymic--a special name appended to the work apres coup And similarly for Michel, as for the many feminist theorists to whom his cast is conceptually indebted, the "sexual" in art is not necessarily a matter of easy in mind or narrative. On the contrary, notwithstanding the exhibition's subtitle and with the exception of rape, relatively not many of the works on exhibit show what could be called sexual subjects; there is little that conforms to any notion of the erotic. Like Jacqueline Rose in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Michel understands sexuality to manifest itself symptomatically in the work of art, in figure of speechs of castration, fetishism, disturbances in the visual field and other indices of the (masculine) unconscious.