Bodies, Bodies Everywhere
(how studying art history turned me into a thriller writer)
by Laura Leffler
As a student of art history, I was taught to ignore the bodies—the many, many bodies, mostly female and mostly nude—strewn through textbooks and set on pedestals and hung from gallery walls. In art history, you see, bodies are not really bodies; they are vessels. A body is form. It is light and shadow and line and curve. It is a shape in space, a means to an end. Something to be used—to be handled—by the master.
Such so-called masters don’t even have to be male—at least, not after a certain point in history. For centuries, women were not allowed to be students or apprentices (just as they were kept from most every other profitable employ—thus beholden to the men in their lives). They were excluded from studios and workshops, where their male counterparts studied anatomy and learned how to make pigments and source materials. Indeed for most of human history, women were not given the chance to master art, or anything else. But after the proliferation of mirrors during the Renaissance, we start to see a shift: the most precocious (and privileged) female artists realized that, with a mirror, they had a constant subject available to them—themselves.
Even now, centuries later, representational artists, both male and female, still depict the female form in much greater numbers than its male counterpart. Women artists explore the female body, their own or others’ but mostly their own, to all sorts of effect. Some, like the early feminist performance artists of the 70s, set out to shock the public. Others prefer to titillate—the soft-porn quality of Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings come to mind. Some, like Ana Mendieta, politicize the body, making statements about sexual violence. And some, like Francesca Woodman, record their own disappearances.
The art market approves of the disparity, perhaps even helping to reinforce it: According to Artnews, portraits of women achieve higher prices than portraits of men at auction. A muse or a self, it doesn’t matter. The female body is everywhere in the art world.
Studying this phenomenon led me to question that has nagged at me for decades. It is a question to which I have found no satisfying answer and that pushed me to answer it myself, in the form of a novel: Now that women have equal access to models and materials, why do so many choose to objectify themselves?
***
In 2005, I wrote a master’s thesis on Laurie Simmons’ early photographs as a criticism of contemporary social hierarchies, and then I bowed out of academia to take a job in an art gallery. Soon, people started caring less and less about what I thought and more and more about how I looked. I barely noticed. I had become so accustomed to the male gaze and so surrounded by images of women’s bodies (in art and in media) that to fetishize my own physical self made a certain kind of sense.
I was not a visual artist, but I was gazing into the mirror to find out who I was just the same. I was building myself from the outside-in to appeal to the market, to the patriarchy, and to the male ego. Like the women artists I’d studied in grad school, I used myself to advance my practice, and in doing so reduced myself into form, light, shadow, line, and curve. I, too, became a shape in space, a means to an end.
***
For this to make sense, you really have to imagine it: a young female art historian, solemnly walking the halls of some rarefied institution, notebook in hand, absorbing everything there is to take in, including the tacit message that her body is an object to be used. Add to that the barrage of media representations – from Marilyn Monroe to Britney Spears – and the message they send. A female body is something to feast upon until the bones have been licked clean.
I brought this dilemma to my novel in the form of a question. What happens when a young woman wants to succeed in this hall of mirrors? What happens when she is ambitious enough to cannibalize her own self to ensure that success?
I began writing the story of a young and ambitious artist who, because of the circumstance of her appearance, believes that her self-worth exists solely on the exterior. She is desperate to succeed in an industry that wants her to be a muse, not an artist. She, like the women who came before, gazes into the mirror. She falls prey to exceptionalism and envy. She is mistreated and pushed into a corner. And then she must make a choice: lean into the status quo, or fight back.
Here, my one character metaphorically splits into two. One begins to replicate herself in her work—over and over again, she makes pictures of her physical form, looking for the truth in who she is and what she is worth. She makes so many copies of herself that the original begins to fade. The image becomes the only reality. This artist is an ouroboros, forever consuming herself. The other self watches this happen. She cannot control it, but she doesn’t know how to fight it—at least not at first.
***
It’s easy to fetishize the art object. It exists as a thing to behold, to worship, to seek, and to trade. It is imbued with supernatural value, and as such, often goes without question or suspicion. For years, I accepted this because I, too, love the object. The magic of a thing that has traveled from hand to hand, from place to place, and from time to time, to reach me, now, here. In old pieces, I am transported by the materiality of time: craquelure spiderwebbing across dry oil paint, erosion in a wood plank, sweet foxing on the edge of an old photograph. In newer works, I find context for my own existence.
And that’s the whole problem.
Laura Leffler is a writer and art historian who builds stories within the gorgeous, strange, and sometimes terrifying art world. After receiving a master’s degree in post-war and contemporary art history, she spent more than a decade working in commercial galleries. Her writing has appeared in Art Journal, Art Papers, The CAA Review of Books, Crack the Spine, CrimeReads, Electric Lit, LitHub, and Writer’s Digest, as well as in several museum catalogues. She lives in Colorado with her family. TELL THEM YOU LIED is her first novel.