Looking. Historically, it was Tom peeking at Lady Godiva, birthing the sexually voyeuristic "Peeping Tom." Today, it's more complicated. Psychiatrist Danielle Knafo believes the artist deals with "primal scene experiences and fantasies by taking control of a situation in which they were once passive." She defines "primal scene" as the child voyeur wishing to observe parents copulating.
Certainly, some sort of sexuality, which can be understood as power (or power understood as sexuality) always lingers in "looking", even if repressed or concealed. Once beyond a Freudian glossary, however, voyeurism scrambles for definition. Its inevitability in our everyday lives seems beyond the litany of social sciences and such issues as pornography.
An accelerating politic of sexuality is fostering change, and directly altering gender conditioning and stereotypes, and perhaps, psychoanalytic theory. At the forefront is feminism in all its forms, and gay militancy. Obviously, received or perceived ideas accentuate gender-assigned roles which are then refined and elaborated, and sway our psychological, social and sexual lives. Voyeurism is gender intensive, and its practice affects conformist dominant or passive roles. Louise Kaplan, in Female Perversions, writes:
What makes a perversion a perversion is a mental strategy that uses one or another social stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, in a way that deceives the onlooker about the unconscious meaning of the behaviors she or he is observing.1
Larger and perhaps more significant questions lurk beneath the question of who's who in the voyeur gender game. Societal shifts impact our freedoms of "looking." A building conservatism supports new legislation policing nearly anything not meeting a "PC" litmus test. Its immediate reaction is a lack of federal and state funds for exhibits that are problematic, most often with sexual or alternative gender content. Other shifts are potentially more dangerous. What we "look at" is shrinking, and those "looking at us" are growing. This includes censorship of the Internet, and domination of content providers in television, film, and video by a handful of corporations. Advance in surveillance is still another trend, and particularly frightening is the culture that governs its practices.
So, where are we when it comes to "looking?" That's what we wanted to discover when we formulated the theme for our show and this issue. We know voyeurism by individuals, groups and government is prevalent throughout our society. It is idiosyncratic to the human condition, an integral part of society that is altered as a society is altered, whether voyeurism alters or is altered.
Who better to define the intersection we're at than the artist, the ultimate voyeur, and those who write about art? Voyeur's Delight examines "looking," ranging from the clinical pathological definition postulating voyeurism as a perversion (men are primarily implicated) to participatory voyeuristic pleasures as a prime aspect of a media culture.
Many of the contributors to this issue scrutinize sexuality and gender roles through technologies that distance the voyeur from the object watched - video, film, still photography, and of course, Cyberspace. This newest voyeur playground may well be the ultimate detached medium. Virtual communities allow users to "manipulate characters and places"2 as one Cyberseer noted, subsidizing an unshackling of gender, or combination of genders, instantaneously and anonymously. Joseph Nechvatal, in his essay, adds dimension to Cyberspace. It is safe, and, because of its artificiality, dead. (Does that translate, unthreatening?)
Joseph Nechvatal, Janine Gordon, and collaborators Linda Montano and Bob Anderson are purveyors of the Internet. Nechvatal's computer installation challenges technology as a demonic voyeur, and continues the artist's investigation into "mass-media standardization and the domination of corporate-capitalist social paradigms."3 His complex installation, years in the making, personifies conflict in Cyberspace as censorship seeks to define the images a free society can tap into.
Montano, who traditionally externalizes fear, joins with Anderson and demonstrates a new security in the detached architecture of electronic space. Viewers sit at a privately-situated computer and in total anonyminity, type intimate questions about the taboo, "voyeurism." The duo, detached and secured, answer the questions online. Gordon explodes the notion of voyeurism as secret, and hence, exclusive to gender. She stages "gang bangs" online before the gaze of the entire Web. Alan Sondheim elaborates upon voyeuristic "virtual life" in his essay. He examples a couple physically exposing themselves on the Internet, and questions: "Surely, they realized they were on a public site. Or, did they?" (Perhaps Alan should talk to Janine.)
Cyberspace, however new, is overshadowed by the ancient game of plain "looking, and international artists Sophie Calle and Michel Auder are masters. In "Hotel," Calle with practiced stealth, disturbs intimacy as she works as a hotel maid, photographing and cataloguing the contents of guests' rooms, to reveal an "interior life beneath the veneer."4 Intrusiveness is the subtext, and perhaps a glimpse of a future under a prying government. Freudians, on the other hand, might consider Calle's work a displacement of sexual impulses.
A critic has called Auder "the Video Laureate."5 Auder, obsessed with video taping through windows, curtains and doorways, frequently eschews the overtly sexual, but never the personal. As with Calle, Auder seduces the viewer with ephemeral glances, using the commonplace to let us glimpse larger issues, and enforcing what another critic notes for Calle, is the art of "impervious nonchalance and feverish obsession."6
Artists looked at the seamier side of voyeurism, and found more. Dike Blair sees the voyeur as exploited (a view most strippers hold, according to him), and he contemplates the complex layers of voyeurism, using his installation, the "Gray Goo Lounge." to convey humor, irony, sadness, escape and transcendence. Film makers Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano, and artist Barbara Pollock parody pornography. They speak to voyeurism as gesture and cliche, and their works attain a generality where images no longer impact sexually. Ian Grey investigates the phenomenon of "generalizing" in his essay, noting the movie "audience has become inured over time to visual monstrosity" and requires another reality.
Where as one group generalizes, Maciej Toporowicz specifies, presenting lush photography of nubile women, prostitutes in Thailand, AIDS infected, or soon to be. His vision, packaged in beauty and custom scents, is multi-layered, but disarmingly clear.
As we commented at the offset, voyeurism exists everywhere. Molly Blieden's installation shows how instructive dialogue transforms into perverse sexual impressions as the imagery being described comes to life in X-ray viewing boxes. Another medical view is by Jocelyn Taylor. Her gynecological examining room explores medical sexist voyeurism, formed and sanctioned by turn-of-the-century scientific beliefs and practices.
Four artists, Lee Gordon, Susan Leopold, Sarah Schwartz and Chrysanne Stathacos, treat voyeuristic object-and-viewer as one. Their work begs the complex concept being defined by new media studies: Is the medium truly the voyeur and the spectator the object? Gordon retreats to masquerade in his self-portraits, afixing his adult head to the bodies of young girls. Leopold's installation uses mirrors, video surveillance and text to draw the viewer into a space, until the space surveys the person. Schwartz documents herself with video as she still-photographed herself in seductive poses. Again, individual as voyeur and object. What is the relationship? Stathacos doubles the stakes, utilizing a videophone in a mirrored booth. In their reflected environment, viewers communicate via videophone, monitoring personal response in the mirrors as well as Chrysanne's image on the videophone.
Two painters, Jane Dickson and Robin Lowe, continue the investigation of reversal. Dickson offers paintings of lookers peering out of lighted windows high above Times Square. As with Dickson, Lowe's portraits of children in distorted environments intrude, and uncomfortably transform the role of the viewer.
Another painter, Charles Yuen uses technically lush and layered oil paintings to initiate secret games and attract the voyeur with sexual suggestion. The viewer intuitively knows something's going on, but what?
French photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici and sculptor-installer Aimee Morgana are apart, yet together, in their "looking." Lopez-Huici is intimate, Morgana public. Lopez-Huici's photographs raise "theoretical issues involving... voyeurism."7 Her "woman trimming pubic hair", a more compelling counterpoint to Eric Fischl's "Haircut," starkly, and dramatically, confronts the voyeur with a normality beyond the pale.
Aimee Morgana investigates sadism in spectacle. Employing the Coliseum to contemporary talk shows, Morgana's work explores scopophilia (instinctive need to see), and public suffering, which we obsessively watch, if not enjoy.
Shelagh Keeley establishes a "Boudoir" environment: bou'doir (boo'dwar) n. (Woman's) small private room. [F, lit. sulking-place (bouder sulk)]. Entrance into the "Boudoir" is an invasion and the secrets of her icons address the question of voyeurism as pleasure.
Another pleasure is eavesdropping. In a dark closet, Juliana Luecking hurdles gender practices, taping the answers to three documentary-skewed questions she asked of lesbians: Favorite fantasy? What makes you come? How do you go down on a woman?
Thomas Lanigan Schmidt poses collaged crown sculptures as ritual objects that evoke a shrine, ensnarling sexuality and religion, a partnership he feels preordained. The viewer celebrates an ephemeral moment of reverie, then an intimate time discovered in the "peep" holes of his crowns.
Two "watchers," Julia Scher and Andrea Scrima are at opposite ends. Scher talks, talks, and then talks some more in her events leading to becoming a "watcher." The viewer, begins as voyeur, is drawn into the narrative, and ends up like Scher, "watching" themselves. Scrima, concealed in a large windowless space with only a bullethole as an eye to the outside, conceives her ideas. Compulsively glued to the bullethole, she records an outside world symbolized by the fantasy of a glimpse. Both artists examine a delicate, disconnective voyeurism, both enlightening and disconcerting.
Finally, DK (Jeff Asencio) offers a video parody of where it started, a street-wise, pop version Peeping TomWe wish to thank our contributors for an enlightment far beyond our expectations. (A special thanks to Martha Wilson and New Observations for believing in Voyeur's Delight and all our sponsors, and donors, including Dialogue Systems, Inc.)
Footnotes:
1. Kaplan, Louise, Female Perversions, pg. 9, Doubleday,1991.
2. Berners-Lee, Tim, Technology Review, July 1996.
3. Galleries Magazine, 1991.
4. Elle Magazine, Aug 1991.
5. Saltz, Jeff, Art in America, July, 1994.
6. Wagstaff, Sheena, Parkett, 1990.
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