Cartographies of the Feminine

Edited version of Essay by Janice Cheddie for 'Hulagirl'

Waygood Gallery, Newcastle November 2004

Artists:

Miranda Whall and Lynne Marsh

The work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari opens out two possibilities for thinking about Lynne Marsh's and Miranda Whall's work, through their concepts of haptic space and the body as assemblage. Deleuze's and Guattari's work offers a radical critique of Cartesian subjectivity. In the work of Deleuze and Guattari the subject and the object can no longer be held in binary oppositions or as separate entities. Deleuze and Guattari's work positions the subject and object as a series of fluid movements, strata, segments and intensities capable of being linked together or severed in potentially infinite ways. This theorisation of the body removes the body from its traditional binary opposition of nature/female-culture/masculine. Deleuze and Guattari's work draws our attention to the layers, and fluidity between structures and organisms. The body for Deleuze and Guattari, is not a physical property, it is a provisional assemblage, producing connections, between ideas, human, animate, inanimate all which have the same potential for producing new forms of subjectivity. Within Deleuze and Guattari's work there is no hierarchy of being, any central organisation or plan to which these fluid organisms must conform. Deleuze and Guattari's work in relationship to both artists work draws our attention to the construction of surfaces, of flows, energies, and movements being linked together in endlessly possibilities. Through Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of the body as a series of flows, we can begin to focus on the construction of the surface of the image, a concern that is also present in ‘haptic space'.

The concept of the ‘haptic' as a cognitive experience comes from the work of art historian Alois Riegl (1927) on early Roman art particularly textiles. Riegl's work has been taken up by critical theorists to explore the specificity of cinema and digital media. In Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari appropriate Riegl's term to describe a notion of space that is contingent, close up, and short term lacking a fixed point of reference. Haptic space for Deleuze and Guattari, may be visual, tactile and auditory, thus we may begin to think of the notions of the haptic space in relationship to Whall's digital images and Marsh's DVD installation ‘Ballroom (2004)' which employs sound as a key element of the installation space.

On entering the gallery, we are immediately presented with two very different sets of viewing relationships. Miranda Whall ‘s three large panels ‘Paradise Place (2003) ', ‘Softly, Softly (2003') and' Sue Lawley (2004', invite the viewer to have a closer look; whilst Marsh's presents us with a large-scale projection of her DVD ‘Ballroom' . Both Marsh and Whall produce within their work a notion of Roland Barthes ‘punctum', a seemingly innocent image that on closer inspection produces a shock or ‘sting in the tail' thus engendering new levels of visual engagement, and in the case of Marsh's ‘ Ballroom' aural and temporal engagements.

Weaving the Digital.

On initial viewing, Whall's panels appear to be presenting the viewer with a series of decorative large-scale reproductions of domestic lace dollies. However, on closer inspection the viewer is presented with a series of intricately drawn self-portraits of the naked artist masturbating in a range of mechanical, natural and constructed environments.

Whall's panels draw us into the haptic space, through a number of devices. Firstly, through the referencing of the panels to the highly tactile and intricate designs of French and Flemish eighteenth century lace, and secondly through the scale of the detail in the panel itself, thus inviting the viewer into a relationship of proximity. Whall's ‘punctum' is the disruption of the idea of industrious feminine producing decorative coverings for the home, through her self-portraits of female masturbation, embedded in the structures of the lace-like panels.

In utilising the ‘haptic' in relationship to Whall's work I am not only referencing the viewing relationships that her work, but I am also seeking to highlight the processes of Whall's processes of fabrication. After initially drawing her images Whall scans the images into the computer, and then digitally replicates and repeats the images. These images are then mapped onto the virtual space of the computer to produce the intricate structures of the panels.

In negotiating these various layers Whall's brings the audiences into a series of connecting narratives concerning the relationship between art and notions of craft, the woven material and the artist's hand drawings. These relationships are further complicated by the removal of the ‘trace' the line of the original drawings. Thus inviting questions on the relationship between technology and craft and status of the ‘original'. Are the ‘originals' Whall's individual drawings that are scanned onto the computer? Or, are the originals, the disparate and numerous files that comprise the mapping of Whall's drawings into the morphological structure of the panels?

In Whall's work there is a play on the notion of the ‘tactile' as a feminine attribute. Whall's work seemingly invites us into a haptical space however; notions of the tactile feminine associated with artists textile works are forced into question. The structure and the surface of the image do not reproduce the artist's mark, what we encounter on closer inspection are seamless, unbroken lines.

Whall's earlier pieces ‘ Softly, Softly' (2003) rendered on aluminium plates disrupt the expectation of the haptic as a sense of touch, forcing the viewer into contemplations on the processes of making, and the mapping of the real space of the gallery and the mapped spaces of virtual space. Sue Lawley (2004) a later work directly plays with the expectation of the viewer. In Sue Lawley , Whall experiments with the process of fabrication. These experiments have led the artist to new fabrication techniques that appear to replicate the ‘tactile' structure of paper/textile. But even within this panel the connection that critic Laura U. Marks has attempted to make between the haptic, as a tactile surface, and the surface of the skin are disrupted. Whall's processes of fabrication reinforce the simulacra of the virtual space as a space mapped through connections, associations and intensities, rather than a space produced through physical and visual markers. Like a hypertext narrative Whall's work reproduces the body as a series of associations and linkages rather than as the site of female authenticity:

The repetition of body, within Whall's various panels, produces the body in relationship both to the morphological structure of the lace and other elements within the panel. Whall's panels suggest a transformation in the nature and structure of female desire. In her self-portraits Whall presents a female body freed from the constraints of child bearing and rearing. Whall's body and its fertility cycle emerge as a series of temporal flows and energy sources that can create connections and new modes of being with other surfaces and structures.

Secondly, Marsh introduces into the notion of the haptic, the role of the sonic in the construction of spaces. Echoing her physical exploration of the space as a fluid temporal flow. In ‘ Ballroom' Marsh evokes the physical ballroom as a sonic space, maintaining the link between sound, technological sound production and bodies in movement. However, Marsh's punctum operates on the level of the sonic, the sound produced are not melodic, rhythmic sounds designed to regiment the body into formulaic dance steps. Marsh in ‘Ballroom' renders the sonic as a means of exploring the relationship between the listener's sound, time and place. Thus, the sonic is not an object that one can explore but rather the production of space through a temporal embodiment of the viewer/listener's space. Thus Marsh explores haptic space as fluid, smooth space, without borders or boundaries. In ‘ Ballroom' Marsh highlights the sonic by asking the viewer/listener to reconsider the temporal movements of transition: moments of transition as the movement from one transformative space to another. In this conception of time the body becomes a fluid and intense form of energy and flows.

Marsh and Whall as artists working within the realm of the digital have through their various creative processes, sought to engage their audiences into a series of enchanting and often humorous journeys into the structure and surface of the digital image. No longer a merely technical terrain, Marsh and Whall explore the artistic and creative potential of the digital realm. In these explorations we are drawn into the processes of repetition, non-linear space, and the realm of the digital as explorations of the feminine, and its radical potential as a space of creative transformation.

Janice Cheddie

Published by Northumbria University Fine Art Press 2004 ISBN: 1 - 902792 - 30 - 0

Bibliography.

Barthes Roland, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography, Flamingo, Fontana Paperbacks, London 1980.

Deleuze Gilles and Guattari Felix, Difference and Repetition, Continuum, London and New York, 2001.

Deleuze Gilles and Guattari Felix, Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, London and New York, 2001.

Gargett, A., ‘Eternal Feminine: Natacha Merritt ‘Digital Diaries': Postfeminist Deleuzian Figurations,' Parrallax, Vol. 8., No. 4, 2002, [32-45]

Manovich, Lev ‘Language of New Media', MIT Press, Massachusetts and London 2001.

Marks, Laura U. ‘Video haptics and erotics', Screen 39:4, Winter 1998

Marks, Laura U., ‘The Skin of the Film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses', Duke University Press, 2000.

Plant Sadie, ‘Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and The New Technoculture, Fourth Estate, London, 1998.