ANTWERP.- A considerable part of what we call Western civilization was founded on a specific fear. From the design of our legal and political institutions, all the way to the horizon of expectation between the sexes, that is, what we are allowed to expect in professional and personal terms, many of these grandiose things were guided by a type of fear harbored above all by men. It is the fear of women.
Think of some of the cultural initiators figures of our traditions, like Eva or Pandora. Responsible for our perils and downfalls, they were nothing more than women doing as they pleased. But by doing so, they ruined the lives of men and as a consequence, the entirety of the human race. The same would apply, centuries later, to the figure of the witches, who were burned at the stake for not conforming to what was expected of them. Many of the men responsible for this interdiction, like Augustine of Hippo, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, were figures disturbed by the impossibility of controlling their bodies. Unable to discipline their desires, they invested their careers—in branches of influence that persist to this day—trying to control other people’s desires. And women, for them, were the utmost symbol of the lack of control. They needed to be controlled.
Control, in any event, can be exerted in many different forms. On the one hand, control can be applied through hard power, that is, through military means, the judiciary system, or ordinary discipline. If you do something wrong, you will pay for it, sometimes with your life. However, on the other hand, a much more elaborate power can be exerted: control via culture, through the naturalization of patterns and behaviours. Here, the intricacies are much more sophisticated, operating in ways that usually are not even clear to us. Without realizing it, we are following rules and desiring things that we don’t even know how they appeared on our radar in the first place. Religion maneuvers in this register.
The cult of Mary, or Marian worship, has been one of the most effective ways of exerting control over women over the centuries. Even if, historically, the cult was not invented when Jesus was born: the dogma surrounding the Immaculate Conception, the notion that the Virgin Mary was free from original sin at the moment of her conception, was not established by the church until 1854. The impact of this belief, in any case, is multiple, but, in short, it fostered a lasting vision of women as loving, pure, beautiful, disciplined, and reserved beings, whose existence revolved solely around their children. In other words, around the idea that a woman’s purpose in life is motherhood, an image strongly supported by the church’s public relations machine—art.
Ancient, ingrained conceptions die hard. Nonetheless, the last two centuries saw many waves of movements challenging the notion that the purpose of women in the world was to give birth and become mothers. Slowly but surely, changes started to be made; apart from the strictly political movements that fought over this restrained idea of what was up for women to accomplish in their lives, artists also weighed in, counter-attacking this dogmatic vision through art, using the same grammar employed by the church. Thus, female artists started showcasing other forms of being in the world that were not restricted to the agenda set forth by the cult around Mary. In this sense, the exhibition “Mary With(out) Child,” presented at the GNYP-Antwerp, can be understood as part of this effort.
Twenty-three artists, men and women, participate in this exhibition, dedicated to showing various facets of what it means to be a woman. Naturally, the panorama is vast, both thematically and stylistically, although it doesn’t claim to be a comprehensive approach. There are, for instance, sensual representations of women, such as is the case with Callan Grecia, Ariane Hughes, Koak, Lizzy Lunday, Claire Tabouret, Xu Yang, or even as in the case of Polina Barskaya, Gina Beavers, Motoko Ishibashi, and Aiste Stancikaite, in which the object of desire is just one aspect of the woman’s body, in a way a visual translation of the Freudian notion of fetishism. Here, women use the church’s interdiction over the body as a tool to render them the upper hand. That is, instead of being ashamed of their bodies, they are in control, acting upon the world. Sometimes they glance upon themselves, reflecting upon what means to gaze. Other times, they look at us, the viewers, integrating us in this dynamic of seeing and being seeing, so central to the question of what means to be a woman in the world.
Moreover, the purity suggested by Mary is nowhere to be seen in a different selection of works, such as in the canvases by Márcia Falcão, Elizabeth Glaessner, Elsa Rouy, Nour El Saleh, Joanna Woś, or in the drawings by the great polish artist, Wojciech Fangor. In these cases, women use their sexuality as a tool to grant them what they want, or simply as a way to shock, transforming art—historically a vehicle for the promotion of good manners of states, the bourgeoise, and the like—into a fighting ground. In this regard, works more anchored in history, like Rob Ober’s, conjugate the figure of Mary with that of the Witches, all of them looking at us, demanding recognition. The appropriation of history, furthermore, although in different contexts, is presented by Sarah Naqvi, willing to expand upon the myths that informed our traditions.
But so far, all these works represent mostly women alone, as independent as they can be. Yet total independence is also the possibility to choose whether they want to be a mother or not. That third group of paintings, then, comprising works by Zachary Armstrong, Angela Dufresne, Jenna Gribbon, Agata Slowak, and Chloe Wise, depict scenes related to motherhood, be it showing the painter’s children or a family representation. What these works establish with the other group, is the reaffirmation of various facts of what entails to be a woman today. The fact that almost all works here are done in a different pictorial language only attests to that.
João Gabriel Rizek
