Goddess redux - sculpture of Audrey Flack

In 1983 after more than 30 years as a painter, Audrey Flack turn rounded her attention to sculpture. The instability she perceived in one as well as the other the world and the art world provok in her a desire for the "substance of sculpture--something solid, real, tangible."(1) At the same time, she sought an art that could subserve as a new form of private icon and public testimonial During the last decade, Flack has acquired formidable rule and skill in traditional figure statuary producing a body of work center upon women and consisting mostly of goddes images.

Technically, Flack's statuarys are masterful imitations of the human material part but they raise many thorny questions. Are these goddesse a postmodern appropriation of classical form, or are they kitsch? Are they belated echoe of an earlier feminist fascination with the "goddess" or do they furnish positive and inspirational originals for contemporary women? Do these figures make corporeal a fantasy of a universal womanhood that denies ethnic and racial difference, or do they actually destabilize conventional notions of female identity?.

Indeed, not many viewers have been quite confident exactly how to place Flack's work. The reviews of her novel and first, retrospective, in which a number of her goddes statuarys were exhibited, are replete with powerfully worded opinions that range from rhapsodic acclaim to sarcastic derision, with a doom of nervous speculation in between.(2) As William Wilson, critic for the looks Angeles Times, observed, it is "nearly impossible to like or dislike Audrey Flack's art in the ordinary sense"(3) However, when examined from the perspective of contemporary feminisms, the actual qualities in Flack's goddesses that have been largely responsible for the uneasy critical reception of her work can be seen to incarnate conscious esthetic strategies.

Flack's goddes plastic arts range in size from figurines to colossi, and their regards range from mythological to imaginary. Collectively they allude to the "return of the goddess" a feminist discourse repeatedly associated with the belief in a certain number of underlying and eternal essence of "woman." For example, the use of the goddes motif in the early '70 by dint of artists like Mary Beth Edelson and Betsy Damon can be read as the produce of a nostalgic longing for a missing matriarchal past. For many feminists, this kind of "essentialism" remains troubling in many respects: in its naive utopianism; in its simplistic notion of sex as an absolute, static condition rather than as an ongoing proces of construction; in its denial of difference between women of different subcultures--in short, its willful disregard of all the issues with which contemporary feminists are struggling to approach to terms.

I would argue, however, that Flack's goddesse do not incarnate a strictly essentialist viewpoint. The works are too eccentric and bizarre in their melange of imagery to be seen simply as goddes worship images. They do not elicit woman-worship or make open onto a realm of transcendent meaning; instead they indicate an unstable content located in a more culturally volatile, productive and problematized representation of "woman." Flack herself describes these figures not alone as goddesses but as a kind of "new woman."(4) Their lineage can be traced to her paintings of active, forceful women of the like kind as Truman's Teachers (1964) or those sternly egotistical Sisters of the Immaculate Conception Marching for Freedom (1965) leading a cluster of Civil Rights marchers. However, the goddesse engage different themes and issues than these earlier images--discourses of the material substance tradition and allegory.

Since the feminist motion began, women artists have drawn outed to find ways to expres the reality of women's experience of the material substance in all its diversity and contradictions. Their initial efforts, however, many times provoked objections from feminist critics. In the 1970 many attempts to exhibit the female body from a woman's perspective were characterized either as essentialist or as inadvertently replicating the high-art and mass-media conventions that had objectified women's bodies in the first place. In the next to the first half of the '70s and completely through the 1980s, feminists engaged with psychoanalytic theory went for a like reason far as to contend that because the psychological mechanism of viewing women's bodies was embedded in voyeurism, scopophilia and the position of woman as "other" to male desire, the female material substance could not be imaged at all without being depersonalized and objectified.

More freshly although artists have continued to bring out works that address the cultural and psychological positioning of women the desire to show the female body from more diverse perspectives has intensified. Women artists are now attempting to depict the female material substance in ways that both deconstruct essentializing or objectifying discourses and allude to new ways in which to envision it.(5)

Flack's interweaving of multiple and repeatedly conflicting references--to classical and Academic plastic art for example is the lock opener to her presentation of a "new woman." In her goddesse Flack exploits retro traditions that have a tenuous grasp upon contemporary imaginations, and whose meanings are therefore render free of access to artistic manipulation. In Islandia: Goddes of the Healing Waters (1987) a figure on the outside of the artist's imaginary pantheon, she busys visual modes that do not engage our cultural obsession with the debased female material part found in Hollywood and in advertising imagery.(6) Instead she make go rounds to the devalued conventions of the Academic [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] and of public, monumental civic statuary of the 1920s and '30 as well as the more distant archetypes of Classical sculpture. Flack admires works from these periods; she has mustered Victorian and 19th-century Academic paintings by the agency of William Etty, Adolphe-William Bouguereau and John Everett Millais. She also likes British 19th-century Academic statuary such as that of Sir Alfred Gilbert. (7)