Essay commissioned for the monograph,Barbara Kruger  published by The National Art Gallery,

New Zealand, 1988

http://www.specificobject.com/objects/info.cfm?object_id=6153#.U43teVy1y1J

BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS: YOUR TRUTHS ARE ILLUSIONS

By Lita Barrie

“How can I be distinguished from her? Only if I keep on pushing through to the other side, if I’m always beyond, because on this side of the screen of their projections, on this plane of their representations, I can’t live. I’m stuck, paralyzed, by all those images, words, fantasies. FROZEN. ”
Luce Irigaray, The Looking Glass, from the Other Side.

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice found herself in a wood where things have no name, she began to question her own identity. “And now who am /? I will remember if I can. I’m determined to do it, ” she said.2 But on the ‘other side’ of the looking glass, she cannot remember her given name – the ‘proper’ name, which assigns her a position within an economy of proprietal relations under the name-of-the-father. And so she renames herself, “L, I know it begins with L. ” Thus Alice’s journey through the ‘other side’ of the mirror of masculine language, begins with a redefinition of her identity without reference to patrimony. ‘It’s, of course, reminiscent of the French elle – the third person singular, feminine pronoun. Alice inscribes herself into a feminine text in which she both is and is not ‘one’ . Beyond the mirror of masculine language, the illusion of a unified self is forgotten. In this symbolic act of renaming, Alice assumes a speaking position from the puzzling perspective of a multiple self within a different psychic economy. Having stepped outside paternal authority, Alice feels lost. “And now, which of these finger posts ought / to follow, I wonder?” she asks herself. But on the ‘other side’ of the lens of masculine language, the rules of logic are inverted. Alice has entered a different environment in which she must choose her own path. “I’ll settle it, ” said Alice to herself, “when the road divides and they point in different directions. ” By rejecting the path of linear logic, Alice enters a different discourse in which she can say where she wants to go. The old Freudian problem, “what does woman want?”, evades the logic underpinning masculine language (or so Lacan said). But beyond the mirror of linear masculine logic, words have no ‘proper’ meanings. Alice learns to say what she wants by speaking in riddles. Alice feels confused. “The question is, ” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things. ” “The question is, ” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.

The fable of Alice’s journey might be read as a proto-feminist fiction of a dissident daughter who steps outside the codes of patriarchal authority – defying the self-consciousness reflected through the mirror of masculine logic – to discover what she wants. As we know, in most fictions little girls who take the forbidden journey into the wood alone, choosing their own path, fall into the clutches of the Big Bad Wolf. These fictions were invented to ensure that every little girl learns ‘proper’ behaviour. Which means she must stay at home, away from public affairs, lying in bed asleep, until she wakes up to find herself reflected through the gaze of a man – or rather, a ‘prince’. After all, his missionary position in this fiction has always been his to invent. He will then make a respectable woman of her through an exchange of the name-of the-father for the name-of-the-husband, which will place her in another bed, according to the laws of a masculine libidinal economy. The moral of these stories is that girls must learn to see themselves through the eyes of a beholder or be sentenced to death.

In recent feminist theory, the ‘mirror’ has become a metaphor for the illusory recognition woman receives through the controlling masculine gaze. Trapped in his claims to knowledge, of his interpretation of her body and her sexuality. A reproduction, merely, reflecting back to him a vision of his masculine privilege, she is relegated to the ‘other side’ of masculine desire to serve as a cipher for his heroic psycho-dramas of virility.

The appropriation of woman within a series of metaphors supporting masculine desire, is based on the privilege man bestows upon his own visible sexual organ. Minus phallus, woman is designated as ‘lack’. Thus he takes upon himself the privileged status of ‘oneness’ and she becomes merely his other’ – the negative of all that he is.

But if her sex offers the horror of nothing to see, then she also serves as a reflection of his fear of castration. She becomes the embodiment of the repressed within his unconscious. She is forced to inhabit an absence within the language he invented on an identity principle based on his visible single organ. Her unseen multiple sex is indefinable within the Cyclopean lens of masculine logic. Thus she is made to inhabit silence and can never tell the other side’ of the story.

Not content to simply reduce her to a metaphoric status for his ego, man has transformed the imaginary position woman is assigned within his fictions into an essence. Through the repetition of his fictions over a millennium of history, she has been persuaded that her repression is a ‘natural’ condition: that her anatomy is a destiny. This is the illusory nature of man’s truth, whose status as fiction, women have only begun to understand.

Recent feminist theory is situated at a critical impasse, attempting to articulate different meanings within a language which embodies the symbolic principle, of the phallic ideology it serves. Luce Irigaray uses the fable of Alice’s journey to suggest the transitional space occupied by the feminine unconscious as woman attempts to reinvent a position from which to “speak herself” (parler femme).

Irigaray’s Alice reflects: “So either I don’t have any ‘self’ or else I have a multitude of ‘selves’ appropriated by them, for them, according to their desires. “3 To avoid the fixed identity woman is given through a masculine lens, Irigaray suggests that woman learns to see her ‘selves’ through the splintered and doubling effect of the concave side of the mirror (rather than the plane side). If, as Irigaray writes, “the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, 114 then women must learn to speak through the cracks in the mirror as Alice did, to riddle the ‘proper’ meanings of words, in order to suggest the feminine unconscious which language attempts to repress.

Perhaps because the ‘seen’ is privileged over the ‘unseen’ in a masculine order, femininity has traditionally been identified as masquerade. Irigaray proposes the use of calculated duplicity in a strategy of ‘mimicry’ (mimesis).

As she writes, “One must assume the feminine role deliberately … to convene a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it. Through this tactical complicity with the assigned feminine role, women might deconstruct the position assigned to them, in order to re-inscribe it in some way. Irigaray writes, “To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. 6

Irigaray uses her speculum(7) to stage a mime within theoretical discourse, travelling “back through a masculine imaginary, to interpret the way it has reduced us to silence, to muteness or mimicry … attempting, from that starting-point and at the same time, to (re)discover a possible space for the feminine imaginary. Barbara Kruger uses the spectacle to stage a mime within media stereotypes, stepping behind the masculine lens to expose the way woman has been glamourized, eroticised and fetishized for the masculine gaze – attempting to re-create a space for the female viewer.Kruger writes: “We loiter outside of trade and speech and are obliged to steal language. We are very good mimics. We replicate certain words and pictures and watch them stray from or coincide with your notions of fact or fiction. ” 9

Both Irigaray’s speculum and Kruger’s spectacle reflect the ‘other side’ of masculine fictions, and might be read as feminist allegories for the adult Alice.

Kruger appropriates images from the media to expose the consumption of the cultural construction of ‘femininity’. She mimics the graphic conventions which produce media stereotypes, but counters the immediate impact of the images with superimposed texts, subverting the underlying codes which dictate the ‘proper’ reading. Through this disjunction of image and text, she exposes the cracks within the logic of advertising fictions to reveal how ideological factors structure the unconscious mechanisms of viewing, dictating our habitual readings of images.

Like Alice, Kruger steps behind the mirror of masculine language to construct riddles which become suave entrapments for the male viewer. Her use of pronouns as linguistic shifters, implicates the viewer in the process through which language assigns speaking positions. In a gender-specific address “We’) she ensures that the female viewer is invited to share her journey through the transitional space on the ‘other side’ of the masculine lens, proceeding like Alice, by reading the signs in reverse.

Michel de Certeau once commented that “theorizing always needs a savage. ” Kruger has become the ‘savage’ in the urban jungle of media image implosion, taking an adversarial position by using media conventions against themselves. Adopting the role of a metropolitan street fighter, she mimics the conventions of propaganda posters and the slick paste-up layouts of glossy magazines, to emblazon her message to the widest audience she can reach. Using billboards in the streets, blown-up photographs framed on gallery walls, posters on street lamp-posts, tee-shirts, postcards and matchbooks on shop counters, she expands and shrinks her image-text disjunctions.

Like transmissions from the electronic screens of the techno-science language game we inhabit, her messages assume an astral dimension. They de- and re-materialize like emanations from a computerised communications network. Kruger’s messages fragment speaking positions by infiltrating the memory bank of a global consciousness we activate by pressing the electronic buttons that re-enact our own subjection. Who is the subject? What is the object? Which is in control? In the ‘divine comedy’ which takes place in the universe of astral signs, Kruger short-circuits the currents of this ‘hightech’ linguistic labyrinth.

Just as Kruger’s work blurs the distinction between art and media, it also blurs the distinction between art and theory. The theory at issue is poststructuralism, based on the premise that the world is experienced as a vast text through which we see ourselves. The aim of feminist theory is to rewrite the text which constructs our psyches. Kruger’s work takes its impetus from Jacques Derrida’s strategy of ‘deconstruction’, which aims to displace patriarchal binary oppositions to re-inscribe them with different meanings. In Kruger’s work the displaced oppositions are: identity/difference,subject/object, surveyor/surveyed, prowess/pose, active/passive, culture/nature, history/fiction, based on the opposition man/woman, which she emphasizes with the shifting pronouns, Youll, They/We Despite the theoretical complexity underlying Kruger’s work, her deconstructions have the immediate accessibility of advertising slogans. Kruger mimics the attention-grabbing techniques of advertising, to upturn the apparent simplicity of the meanings we take from advertising, messages. She confronts the seductiveness of advertising on its own territory by providing the same pleasure, which she then undercuts with the accusatory text A savage semiologist within the urban jungle of street signs, Kruger refuses to play nature to your culture, by exposing the acculturation of woman’s body within the phallic ideology of capitalism. In her work, woman’s body never appears naturalized or neutralized, but always written upon, inscribed within the system of power relations on which masculine privilege is based.

Kruger exposes the extent to which woman is positioned as the passive object of a controlling masculine gaze, by using images of women posed behind shattered mirrors (You are not yourself; dappled glass (You thrive on mistaken identity), fractured prisms (We are your circumstantial evidence), under water (I can’t look at you and breathe at the same time); behind veiling devices (Memory is your image of perfection); and with covered eyes (We are unsuitable for framing). This recurrent use of reflective devices over the female face, emphasizes that woman is the site of masculine fictions which prevent her from returning the gaze. However, Kruger uses the superimposed text to declare her refusal to be a reflection of man’s ego (/ will not become what I mean to you).

If man is a Perseus who stole woman’s power of vision, to secure his own cultural privilege by hoarding that power to himself, then it was to make woman a silent icon (Your gaze hits the side of my face) within his psycho trajectory. However, Kruger turns the feminine stereotype back upon itself in mimicry of Perseus’act of blinding Medusa, to rob the stereotype of its power.

Kruger plays upon the linguistic nature of images as visual texts which are read (A picture is worth more than a thousand words). Advertising and the media use superimposed texts to fix and regulate the reading of an Image. This gratuitous relation between text and image, places the viewer in a passive relation as a consumer of meaning determined by dominant ideology. As an adult Alice, Kruger riddles the ‘proper’ reading of the image with a contradictory text to crack the mirror of the advertising spectacle, creating a multiple perspective for the female spectator. Kruger also mimes the narrative conventions of Hollywood-style cinema, in which the narrator’s authoritative voice creates a controlling masculine perspective. Her texts become a feminine voice which refuses the masculine perspective encoded within the photographic image. In this way, she emphasizes that feminine spectatorship has been excluded. She mimics this oversight’ by using her ‘voice-over’ to disrupt the ideology which forms the unconscious mechanisms that structure ‘looking as a masculine position (We will no longer be seen and not heard).

If woman occupies a paradoxical metaphoric status within man’s fictions as both the site of masculine desire and castration neurosis, then Kruqer confronts the male viewer with his fear: that woman can look and talk back. Kruger destroys male voyeuristic pleasure by recalling the ever-present castration anxiety woman symbolizes. The bold red frames which surround her work, play upon this paradox through a pun on mouth and vulva. The voice-over is placed on the ‘lips’ of a feminine speaker, but the talking mouth becomes a threatening gesture: the vagina-with-teeth. Kruger ml . ml . mimics Perseus, by reflecting the symbolic violence man has imposed upon woman, back upon the male viewer. Man has transformed prowess into pose, turning woman into his reservoir of poses, and imprisoning her within a lens which gives orders not to move. Kruger retaliates with an image of a mouth as a tooth is extracted and the feminine text, You are a captive audience. In this way the voice-over turns the image into a castration threat

In an era of proliferating media images, in which capitalism has taken over the production of visual signs, photography has become a prime instrument for reinforcing dominant power relations. The photographic use of the singlepoint perspective lens is based on the camera obscura. Advertising photography uses this controlling perspective to reinforce capitalism, a system based on mastery and control. The use of women’s bodies in advertising marks the convergence of the ideology of capitalism with the interests of a controlling masculine gaze. Thus woman becomes an object of exchange within a phallic economy based on masculine egoistic investments (My face is your fortune).

Photography’s single-point perspective also recalls the theological concept of the ‘eye of god’ – the invisible presence which controls our world view. Kruger parodies the authority encoded within this pictorial convention with the feminine injunction, You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece, inscribed over the Sistine Chapel image of God endowing Adam with his absurd privilege. If man has disembodied himself to speak universally – since men do not speak as men but as authority – it has been to lay down the decree which makes woman’s body his property, making her the ‘matter’ on which his unconscious projections are founded. Ultimately, man transcends himself into the ‘voice of god’. Kruger pretends to obey man’s law., God said it, believe it, and that settles it.

Her voice-over technique mimics the authoritative tone of this ‘voice of god, to expose her irreverence for man’s fictions. She depicts man as an automaton son-of-the-father, re-enacting the plan of subjection: Your assignment is to divide and conquer, You destroy what you think is difference; You substantiate our horror. Man is portrayed as a usurper a bully, whose sleuthing is carried out through voyeuristic control: You molest from afar; Surveillance is your busy work. His sexuality is depicted as sadistic pleasure, a form of symbolic violation to woman: You re-enact the dance of insertion and wounding,- Your devotion has the look of a lunatic sport, Your moments of joy have the precision of a military strategy. His technological advances are depicted as a game in which the goal is to win at any cost: Progress is your most important product, You get away with murder. Man has become a bedlamite Frankenstein, whose megalomaniac
reveries destroy the planet.- Your manias become science; You are an experiment in terror. If man has invented toys which have become terrorist weapons, Kruger exposes the sham nature of man’s self-display with an image of a phallic knife held under water and the feminine text: You rule by pathetic display.

Kruger’s critique is situated at the interstices of media stereotypes, political economy and the institution of art. She does not separate art as purely visual experience, divorced from the cultural fabric through which we read images. But her appropriations are not simple reiterations of the postmodem dictum on the ‘death of the author’. Her deconstructive strategy drives a critical wedge into the culturally-loaded meanings embedded in images, to expose the processes through which we are subjected to ideology which underlies stereotypes. Abandoning the modernist view of the artist working through ‘personal’ experience under the bogus myth of creating ‘original’ forms, Kruger manipulates existing signs. Her interventions are the form her inventiveness takes.

Kruger stages a critique of the capitalist manipulation of art (particularly her own work) within New York’s hard-sell, consumer-orientated Mary Boone Gallery. The notoreity of this gallery is based on the manufacturing of male artists (notably Julian Schnabel and David Salle) into media super-stars, who symbolize the decrepit nineteenth-century myth of the heroic, ruggedly masculine, inspired artist. Their work demonstrates the reactionary side of the great divide in contemporary art practices because they merely revamp old art-referential genres to proclaim the pedigree of their work as collectible art. In contrast, Kruger’s work epitomizes the resistant side of this divide, which attempts to place art within its cultural context, as social signs existing alongside other social signs in order to disrupt repressive cultural codes. 10

It is perhaps the final irony of Kruger’s interventionist approach that she should enter the predominantly male ‘stable’ of a gallery which perpetuates the mythical status of artists, whose work is based on humanist fictions of an essential self-hood. Kruger’s work deconstructs these fictions by exposing the processes through which subjectivity is shaped, formed and positioned within language and images. She exposes the philosophical corruption of the emotional wallowing and romantic indulgences of her reactionary male peers. Interestingly, these criticisms have been applied to some women’s art which explored ‘female imagery’ based on essentialist views of sexuality. .

Unlike the 1970s forms of feminist art, which stayed on the margins of mainstream art institutions, Kruger accepts the challenge of capitalism, in which there is no outside position from which to be effective. By infiltrating the ranks of the citadel, she adopts the deconstructive strategy of working from I within’ existing structures. The modernist concept of a transgressive avantgarde, making ‘alternative’ art by adopting marginality is based on the philosophically defunct view of art’s autonomy from wider culture. Kruger’s work Is complicit with the commodity status of art, but her texts challenge the relations of power within the phallic economy. She uses the bold red frame as an ingratiating device to broadcast the commodity status of her work, but within that frame she upturns the ideology underlying capitalism.

Many of Kruger’s recent works quote well-known cliches (Your money talks; Worth every penny) to emphasize how economics determines social conventions. In other works, she re-writes famous statements using the shifting references to their authors to accumulate further meanings. I shop therefore I am, echoes Rene Descartes, “I think therefore / am, – on which he attempted to philosophically justify human existence on the basis of deductive logic. Kruger undercuts Descartes’ rationalist view of the individual by recalling Jean Baudrillard’s view that the individual is “nothing but the subject thought in economic terms, rethought, simplified, and abstracted by the economy. ” 11 However, the text also recalls a statement attributed to man’s god.- “I am that I am. ” In this way, Kruger exposes the confluence of money, god and phallic privilege within patriarchal ideology. 12

Kruger uses Jean-Luc Godard’s update of Hermann Goering’s statement, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver, ” in When I hear the word culture / take out my checkbook. 13 While Godard disrupted linear narrative conventions in film, Kruger creates a disjunction between image and text based on the same strategy of fragmenting a controlling perspective. Kruger imposes the quotation over an image of a ventriloquist’s dummy, suggesting that the dummy mouths the words of another speaker, which recalls her own mimicing strategies. The more obvious reading of the work is that capitalism pulls the strings behind culture.

Within the phallic economy, women’s affections are bought and sold. Kruger uses an image of a tray of chocolates inside a pink frame to mime a conventional ploy of male sexual propositioning. According to the codes of ‘proper’ sexual etiquette, women are supposed to ‘fake’ pleasure in this exchange. Kruger reverses the positions in this power relationship by quoting the cliche associated with an armed robbery – Give me all you’ve got – in a feminine demand for money and sexual pleasure. The phallic-shaped chocolates positioned on an angle in the tray suggest the beginning of an erection, exaggerated by

the rose buds on the tips. Inside the pink frame suggesting a woman’s mouth – this becomes an image of oral sex. But the mouth threatens to become the vagina-with-teeth, and with the assaultive text becomes a castration threat

If the feminine libido has been theorized as passive (by Freud), as inarticulate (by Lacan) and as a form of impersonation (by Nietzsche), in which woman ‘fakes’ an orgasm she does not experience, then Kruger reverses these masculine fictions with the unlawful demand for what woman wants. But if the ‘dark continent’ discovers her voice, it is to unearth a masculine libido which relies on woman’s silence for its stability.

H616ne Cixous has suggested that man’s castration anxiety is displaced onto woman as a decapitation threat – should women refuse to march in time to the ‘drumbeats’ of a masculine economy. As she writes, “If they don’t actually lose their heads to the sword, they only keep them on condition that they lose them – lose them that is, to complete silence, turned into automatons. ” Kruger, Perseuslike, reflects this condition back upon the male viewer in a form of mimicry which recalls the praying-mantis, which can ‘fake’ her own death to avoid actual death. And, of course, the prayingmantis devours her suitor upon sexual satisfaction. If she does so after mimicing prayer, it is not in obeisance to the god man invented.

The enormous size of Kruger’s work, recalls Alice’s journey through Wonderland, since the viewer is diminished within the scale of Krugerland. The enlarged scale ensures that the spectator experiences, through her or his own body, the mechanisms through which ideology takes the body into its custody.

But in Krugerland the female spectator enters a differentenvironment in which it becomes possible to see the joke that man’s fictions have played upon us. But to see a joke which is both funny and sad, is toenter the different psychic economy of an adult Alice. Having entered Wonderland, Alice felt her body expand and shrink in proportion to the objects around her. She met animals with bodies that disappeared into space. Alice felt puzzled. “Oh, you can’t help that, ” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. – “How do you know Im mad?” said Alice. “You must be” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here. But on the ‘other side’ of the mirror of masculine logic, Alice enters a different economy of language, in which words have value according to the multiplicity of their (im)proper meanings. “When I make a word do a lot of work, like that, ” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra. ”

Notes

1 LuceIriigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter, Cornell University Press, New York, 1985, p. 17.

2 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, Julian Messner, New York, 1982, p. 163. All Carroll citations are from this edition,

3 Luce Irigaray, op cit., p. 17.

4 Op. cit., p. 149.

5 Op. cit., p. 76.

6 Ibid.

7 Luce Irigaray’s Speculum Of The Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill, Cornell University Press, New York, 1985, plays on the pun of ‘speculum’ as both a mirror and a surgical instrument, used for cervical examinations. As a mirror, the speculurn reflects the illusory nature of man’s definitions of woman, the distorting ‘optics of truth’ in his philosophic and psychoanalytic discourse. As a surgical instrument, Ifigaray uses the speculum to scrape beneath the rhetorical surface of Western discourse to expose the hidden gaps in its logic. Beginning with Freud’s lecture addressing the “riddle of the nature of femininity”, Irigaray mimics the “riddle” woman represents to man, to expose “the Blind Spot in an old dream of symmetry. Moving “backwards” through the history of Western philosophy, she ends with a revision of Plate’s myth of ‘The Cave’as the womb of patriarchal dualistic thinking.

8 Luce frigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 164.

9 Barbara Kruger, artist’s statement in Documenta VII, exhibition catalogue, Kassel, 1982, p. 286.

10 Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1985. Foster provides a complex analysis of this division between ‘resistant’ and reactionary’ postmodern practices.

11 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C.Levin, St. Louis: Teicis Press, 198 1, p. 133.

12 Jacques Derrida has rewritten the theocentric logic of the statement, ” I am that I am” as “signifier of all signifiers “, recalling Lacan’s concept of the phallus as the “privileged signifier”. In this way Derrida exposes what he calls the theo-phallo-logo-centrism on which patriachal discourse is based.

13 Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Le Mepris (Contempt), 1963.

14 Helene Cixous, “Castration or decapitation?”, in Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, 198 1, p. 142.

15 Ibid., p. 143.