The conquest of gender

by Thomas Boström

What if the nature of the human being cannot rightly be conceived of in isolation from the language with which we understand and explain ourselves – if the very same terms we use to analyse our individual points of departure ultimately lock us into a fiction that is the sole determinant of how we find the answers to questions concerning the relationship between gender, sexuality and identity? Then it may be that the notoriously familiar question, "Who am I?", must as a consequence of its historical displacement from person to system be reformulated to a far more context-dependent and process-oriented "Where am I?" or "How do I become?". And "who" really qualifies me to be a human being in a world that increasingly seems to be governed by a lack of inner structure, homogeneity and obviousness?
When a question aimed at our existence in general terms lies outside a person's own ability and scope, a new kind of vulnerability is generated. We define ourselves in relation to some over-determined societal norms and regulations which create the roles that we occupy and which we are assigned in our daily lives. This social theatre of daily life is not something that we can place ourselves outside; it is part of the fabric of human existence. In acting, there are more or less fixed rules for performance which serve to maintain and establish the social justice of a system that is in its own way continually being refined into something approaching an autonomous and affirmative segment of reality. One negative by-product of this is that we can come to lock each other into an imaginary world in this special system, in which the other person does not really exist, but only our prejudices about her. In the meeting with the unknown, the danger is that we will encounter only our own knowledge (which is produced by the system), and which provokes anxiety at various levels. Through language, we can enter into a community which discreetly ensures that the unknown is placed on a special shelf, and that a special human adaptation to a given form of society can be realised. A single form of behaviour is demanded, while others fall victim to mechanisms of social exclusion in which the latter's mode of recognising and experiencing reality is fenced in and isolated from us as the "other", the potentially revolutionary. In relation to the gender issue, a heterosexual, conservative order is dominant, and a panoptical, masculine perspective ensures the maintenance and confirmation of the world we recognise as something we have in common.

Art has a long tradition of exploring this "otherness", this fear of the unknown, whether in relation to the marginal, the exotic, minorities and races, or sexual issues, which are linked to our concepts of gender and identity differences. The question is whether we now stand at a crossroads when we discuss these matters through art. What does the change to a globalised culture mean – a multicultural population and highly pluralistic world views? In various artistic, urbane and gender-"queered" network cultures, this context offers freedom for the individual in the search for answers to the question of one's own identity. But on the other hand, the infinite possibilities to play yourself in the new ambiguous, social space can, paradoxically, mean that self-understanding becomes an inappropriate limitation of the possibilities of interpretation – a feverish attempt to eliminate the confusion. If the latter is the case, our role – and the ongoing human task – must be to examine the mechanics behind the performances that create these restrictions or fictions, and which nourish us as social creatures. What is the substance of the ideas we take for granted about each other in our culture, and how can we utilise the insights of art to ensure that our encounter with the foreign, the unknown, is not merely seen as a meeting with our undifferentiated counter-image?
The author of this article finds in the work of Danish visual artist Kathrine Ærtebjerg (b. 1969) a special testament to ambiguous motifs which counteract the restrictions that arise when we think statically and deterministically about our own identity as gendered, sexual, biological creatures. In her interpretation of the concept of "otherness" – which is perhaps equally an exploration of das Unheimliche – there are dangers which lurk in Ærtebjerg's work and reality is not given fixed boundaries on the wide canvases. The realisation dawns that the things we regard as a matter of course, as phenomena that are natural and neutral, are not in fact inner truths, even though the images are permeated with emotion and imagination. The paintings are also a more discreet, but no less real, expression of the pressure exerted by rigid societal structures, which reign both in the exterior social world and in our conception of a person's inner life; a fixed horizon of expectations, which explicitly articulates what the male and female role must be capable of in order to function.
Kathrine Ærtebjerg creates an interesting alternative with the unfinished identity structure of the teenager. She does not go all the way and claim that everything is a construction, that nothing can be interior or exterior (a barren notion that the human being no longer exists), but points to the fact that the game, or rather the drama, that creates our gender and identity takes place as an uncontrollable and changeable interaction between the interior and the exterior throughout our lives. And it may be that precisely this mutability, this non-static nature, offers us the opportunity to step beyond the customary ideas of who we are, and who the other is; an opportunity to understand what it is that is negotiated in the meeting between people, and in the psyche of the individual. Ærtebjerg's volatile dream provides just such an opportunity to create a special zone, in which the individual and private sphere arises and is projected, sometimes in a menacing fashion, onto the screen.
To follow to the end the path of the fundamental questions of our existence will always give rise to a dramatic, ahistorical primal scream, but will also assume a typical contemporary form. Leonardo da Vinci, in the philosophical spirit of Renaissance humanism, asked himself the same questions as do the artists of our day concerning how and why we came to be, but the answer that the asker receives will always depend on the determining mechanisms acting within a given society at a given time.

To follow such a path to the end in our times might be to claim that there is nothing inside the human being; that we are empty shells, and do not speak language, but that language speaks us. That we can no longer speak of the human being as a natural and biological entity, but rather that our gender, sexuality and identity are determined by our social behaviour, which is obviously a cultural construct. No biology, but only an artificial conception of this.
To understand the radical nature of such a claim, we could point to the fact that intensification of sexuality and the forms of gender expression that appear in the visual culture can arise from false contradictions in the way that we have learned to see the world as a concise socio-culture. The negative effects of the advertising and TV media which celebrate the bodily and sexual surface, speed and pay-off, help to create the roles to which we are assigned every day. Under commercial conditions, identities are demanded which create stereotyped images of men and women, and in which the pendulum marks the extremities in gender identity, not the nascent individual expressions located between the two poles.

The new feminism has focused on this issue for the last 20-25 years, with a main theme being how the woman's physical appearance, her body, which according to these theories is not owned by the woman herself, is made ineffective by continually being ascribed significance on the basis of the masculine perspective, which is socially conservative and repressive towards women.

In her poster-based art, the American artist Barbara Kruger worked during the 80s and 90s with the language of advertising in a subversive manner, creating a wide range of works for the public arena. In one such work, a text is dramatically written across a women's face, and says "Your body is a battleground". With all desirable clarity, this work emphasises that the woman's body is an actual negotiation site in a masculine political arena.
Ultimately, we are born into what these contemporary feminist theories would describe as an omnipresent heterosexual process of norm formation that forces us to think conventionally in relation to the contradictions between the two genders. As such, one kind of sexuality is permitted, another not. Society qualifies us to be good citizens through gender-based and sexual discipline. Fear inhibits us from thinking of the terrain of diverse queered sexuality in between, which in this pre-understanding is therefore discarded as unproductive, disgusting and oddly different. This fiction – that we must understand everything in hermetically contradictory opposites, including our different sexual identities – is apparently twin-headed. On the one hand the fiction functions to clarify the normalisation process – which it can only do in a system which reproduces itself and knows itself from within – but at the same time, the fiction is also extremely adroit in its adaptability. The fiction can only be experienced as real if it is a part of, some would say a motor for, historical change.
One of the most important players in this "gender arena" is the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, who since the 90s has been a globalised rock star among intellectual groups with her concept of human beings who are basically brought into the world without differences between the two genders, but who are then almost violently established and repressed by the power over which society disposes. It seems superfluous in this context to remark that the world we know is invented and implemented by men.
The question in this context is whether art – or the forms in which we recognise it today – presents an opportunity to exceed the defined norms for identity formation and self-understanding that society values and imprints in the individual; a liberation from the obligatory social game from which we cannot otherwise escape. Can painting, and Kathrine Ærtebjerg's exploration and research into "otherness" and das Unheimliche, culminate in an answer which not only remains exotic in the experiential economy of an art expert, but can actually enrich us in our daily relationships with and towards each other? Ideally, art, if it succeeds, displays a sense of social responsibility. To put it in a slightly popular manner, it provides us with a special space for reflection, in which we can learn more about ourselves with the aid of a less imposed perspective. Art continually asks questions and refuses to serve up the answer for us, but leads us in the direction of being able to understand where we are, how we came to be, and probably where we are going.
Overcoming the special, socially-determined forms of gender by offering an alternative perspective on our existential conditions is a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of the artist. Nonetheless, the longing for answers in this area seems to be so ultimately existential that there have been many attempts at this in contemporary art. In this area, too, there is a need for a non-preaching perspectivisation and materialisation by a wide range of works of art, reflecting issues of gender and identity on the basis of the special conditions which prevail our day.
Kathrine Ærtebjerg is a worthy example of an artist who works with these complex relations between gender, sexuality and identity on the basis of a pictorial world which, in all its fruitful and symbolic richness, avoids the stereotypes that usually force us to think in terms of opposites: woman versus man, nature versus culture, hard versus soft, etc. Instead, the observer is offered an imaginative world of ambiguity and extreme mutability, and a consequent recognition of the existential conditions of the human being. The question "How did I come to be?" is painted in with delicate brushstrokes, only to draw back and vanish in the large pastel-coloured spatial representations.
The picture bears the title "Hun var aldrig alene" ("She was never alone"), and was painted over a period of some months in 2004. It can be usefully seen as representative of the special iconography that comprises what we might call the universe of Ærtebjerg's artistic output. "She" is a generalised designation and never an exclusively personal affair, through which the artist consciously renounces an extremely widespread and resilient approach to art in the modernist biographical reading. But if the picture is not about the artist herself, what, then, is it about?
In the picture we are presented with what appears to be a domestic and secure environment, in which the central figure is half visible and half hidden beneath a quilt on an over-sized bed. Exploring this, the observer is met with a feminine gaze that seems alluring as well as pensive and private. With her on the bed we see some remarkable personages – or perhaps rather a collection of animals. She is not, and never has been, alone. The background, or scenery if you like, is composed of a strong red backdrop curtain that marks a kind of border to a theatre of cruelty in which almost any scene can be played out, although with an exceptional cast which exclusively consists of a single actor who projects an inner world populated with monkeys and childish forms towards the observer. Alone, and yet absolutely not alone. An enigmatic universe, which both mimics and produces the missing logic of thoughts and feelings.
The woman/girl/child at the centre of the picture represents what one could meaningfully call a "site of resistance". The teenage figure seeks your attention, but seems ambiguous, and to be not one, but many. She possesses an inner life which cannot merely be studied and categorised on the basis of the adult world's view of and demand for a specific clarification of the details of gender, sexuality and identity formation. Instincts and pleasures create a desire which enables a state of self-sufficiency that cannot be bounded by social norms and conceptions.
In the identification with the easily read figuration of the canvas, the artist offers a special opportunity to the observer. But it is a dispassionate meeting between two worlds, in which the figure to the left of the protagonist, holding a knife in a threatening gesture, bears the catastrophic and fragile element that any psyche potentially encompasses. The inner forces are no longer invisible and pathologically repressed mechanisms, but are revealed and illustrative components that comprise the world and the space for reflection which Ærtebjerg materialises and thereby invites us to participate in. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze speaks of the artist's unique ability to draw the sensuous out of chaos and give it form, to capture invisible forces and pull them out of the darkness. In a phrase borrowed from the Swiss artist Paul Klee, this means, "not to portray the visible, but to make the invisible visible". This is precisely what Ærtebjerg does. In the hiatus, or the confusion that arises in the played-out scene, in which the inconstancy between dream and reality and the teenager's self-chosen changeability becomes a limitation, an opportunity arises to obtain a glimpse into a process of identity formation that will always be uncertain; not just in the girl's bedroom, but as a socially repressed matter of course. The mastery of gender is the experience of contradictions, concealment and breaks that seem permanent, and perhaps for precisely this reason, continue to create room for new insights and possibilities for action over the course of a lifetime.
Kathrine Ærtebjerg's paintings offer us a glimpse behind the curtain, into a reality where rigid concepts of identity, gender and sexual norms have been evacuated, and where it is up to the observer to decide which perspective she will apply to the work: how to interpret and respond to the questions "Where am I?" or "How did I come to be?".
It may be that the clues lie in the actual artistic gesture that acknowledges the presence of the unknown; that which is not domestic and is not mastered by the immediate clarity of language and the sign. "She was never alone" is a metaphor for a permanent condition of not belonging anywhere, other than in a world of psychological concepts. The major insight of consciousness into this condition lies in the constant movement towards not being dependent, whether in the material or the intellectual world, and in particular in the continual social theatre, where the conditions for human existence are laid down. Like the nomad who renounces the enclosure of the home, Kathrine Ærtebjerg's paintings open up a world of illusions in which the conquest of gender appears in the distance.