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Between the Blinds by Dr. Nalin Swaris

The Sunday Observer Magazine of May 19, 2002 carried a photograph of a blonde haired, light brown complexioned young woman on its front cover. The photo was titled 'Sangeetha - Posture Perfect'. An inside page carried a miniature of the photograph with an explanatory blurb. It was an item in a photo exhibition at the Colombo Art Gallery by veteran photographer Timothy Weeraratne. The photo on the front was that of Sri Lankan actress Sangeetha Weeraratne. The blurb informed that the "exhibition encompasses Weeraratne's fascination with still life, enriched, fine tuned and moulded to perfection..." The theme of the exhibition was 'Eye of 65'.

Thus enlightened, I took a closer look at the cover girl. The thin strands of blond hair hanging limp and lifeless was probably a nylon wig. Beneath the blonde wig, the face was blank and expressionless. The outline of the lips were widened and painted bright red to make them look fuller and evocative. The posture of the model seated still and inert suggested complaint surrender to the gaze of the beholder as seen by the imaginative 'eye' of the artist. The patches of skin emanating from beneath the blonde wig and shimmering white pyjama-like dress and white background seemed to have been touched up to make it look several shades lighter. Sangeetha, as "stilllife, enriched, fine tuned and moulded to perfection? This would explain the title of the portrait 'Posture Perfect'.

I wonder why a 'black' (I use the word in its political sense) artist conceived the whimsical notion to portray a 'black' woman, guised as a dumb, blonde, white female? Was the portrait an unconscious subscription to a particular, but projected as an universally true, norm of female beauty?

The photograph titled 'Posture Perfect' raises the wider issue of the representations of women in the visual arts.The aesthetic norms, which today determine our notions of beauty and truth, are conditioned by colonial and neo-colonial influences. The Western ideals of beauty and truth are ideologically underpinned by the philosophy of Plato. Plato held that empirically existent realities are merely the shadowy representations of eternal and universal ideas of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful conceived by an Absolute Spirit.

Plato's philosophy of the Transcendental Absolute Spirit, as ruthlessly deconstructed by Jacques Derrida (Speech and Phenomenon [1967]), is nothing but the construct of a powerful desire to transgress empirical existence, its 'suchness', its inexorable subjection to impermanence, decay and dissolution. Plato's notion of an ideal world appeals to philosophers as well as ordinary men and women, not because it is true, but as Nietzsche pointed out, it assuages their own yearnings for a prefect, eternal and unchanging realm of reality. The movement of masculine desire shifts restlessly from one empirically existent female object to another, because none of them can satisfy a primal lust for 'Woman as Such' - an archetype in the collective unconscious. That is why the sex perverts in our crowded are totally indifferent to the age, size and shape of the female objects they 'brush-stroke'.

Plato's notion of universal ideas profoundly influenced ancient Greek art and its representations of the body beautiful. However, once the notion of ideality is in place, the site of the Ideal Woman can be occupied by different representations in different historical periods and according to changing cultural norms. In the Middle Ages, Christendom, barely emerging from barbarism, was convulsed by the discovery of ancient Greek art, literature and philosophy through contact with Arab civilisation. It led to a renaissance of the Greek ideal of feminine beauty in the arts. Characters from Greco Roman myth and legend provided artists themes to survey and portray the nude female form. These representations were more in keep with Greek rather than Christian tradition. Churchmen were troubled by the worldliness and paganism that swept through the world of arts and much else.

Since the most powerful patrons of the arts were princes of the Church and the Popes, gifted artists employed Christian themes to pursue their explorations of the human body in general and feminine beauty in particular. The Madonnas of Raphael and Rubens were in fact celestialised young Italian women whose external form 'con-formed' to the then current ideal of female beauty, roundedly, fleshy and amply endowed. In conditions of general scarcity not the emaciated urban poor, but corpulently curvacious women, appealed to masculine desire.

The Eighteenth Century European Enlightenment was heralded as a return to the classical age of Greek philosophy and culture, but cut loose from their centuries long ecclesiastical bondage. The so-called 'realistic' portrayals of earthly and earthy women in the Age of Reason and thereafter, were subtly cast in idealistic and romantic terms. Manel's nude, 'Olympia' (1863), was a 'modernised' version of Titan's 'Venus of Urbine' (1538). This return to a return to Greek antiquity set the norm for painting female nudes 'Olympia' was a courtesan, but 'stripped' of anything that might have made her look provocative and wicked. She is shown with a blank and cold expression on her face, modestly covering her pubic area with one hand. It represented the bourgeois ideal of the good and virtuous woman beneath the clothes. Moulded according to the image and the likes of the artist, the recumbent, passive, passionless and unthreatening Olympia, is offered to the gaze of desirous men.

Jean Auguste Dominique's 'Turkish Bath' (1862), is another striking example. This painting of the inside of an Oriental harem is in the form of a perfect circle. The round opening gives access to a vision of other rounded forms, voluptuous breasts, bellies, hips and thighs, inside the painting. Despite the title, none of the harem women are actually bathing. They lie about listless, languid and naked. The woman in the foreground has her back turned to the viewer. She, and all the other women in the painting, are unaware that they are being watched. The intention behind the painting's round form is obvious. It is a keyhole though which the 'eye' of the Occidental male voyeur could get a glimpse of the forbidden 'passion fruit' of the Orient.

Today, the bodies of women have been commodified, and subjected to unprecedented, rampant commercialisation. Due to the super abundance of food and delicacies in the West, the slim and slender, 'fat-free' woman has come to epitomise beauty and desirability. The shifting norms of the ideal body enable the process of cultural inclusion/exclusion; healthy/sick; fair/dark; beautiful/ugly; superior/inferior. One might have expected that given the high prices paid to models, women now control the manner in which they are represented. But what appear to be presentations of themselves by women, are in fact representations responding to masculine desire. Watch the anorexic types choreographed to hip-jerk and scissor-walk the 'catwalks' of Paris, London or New York, and note the expressionless look on their gaunt faces. These highly paid 'beauties' are spectacles little more thinly fleshed skeletal frames functioning as bio-dynamic clothes-hangers for male designers catering to wannabe-beautiful-for-my-man, socialites.

I tend to agree with Belgian-born Parisian psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray's assertion that no real women exist in today's male dominated, globalising, western culture. They exist either as metonyms - representations of noble ideals like justice or freedom, while in real life women are routinely denied both, or, they exist as objects of men's desire.

That is why I bracketed out the name of the model in the title of this essay. Its tolerant is not a real person, but an aesthetized ache in the belly for an ideal type.

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