Ong's Streams of Conciousness: a showcase my undergrad writings

As I transition to my new laptop, I think I probably to back up my old works and writings somewhere. (many of my graphic design projects were lost when I moved to college) And this blog comes to my mind.

I should remark though, that these random stuffs are not of much academic value, so be careful not to quote or take them too seriously. Please excuse the laughable silly, content. (although, any comments are highly encouraged) i put them up here just to show a state of my mind at the time of conceiving them, and in general, how I managed my ways through my college years =)

The first one was quite recent, probably the last humanity paper I wrote in my undergrad life (yeah! Much as I hate the process of writing and bs-ing, I'm starting to miss them). This's a paper for my last core class. (pictures to be fixed)

Fin-de-siecle German literature and art, final paper, 5/13/2007

Klimt's woman: the female as a concept

In several of his famous paintings, Gustav Klimt predominantly uses the figure of woman as a medium of identification with different abstract concepts. Klimt's woman also often represents subversion of classical artistic traditions and paternalistic order, for example, the nude women with teasing gesture in Goldfish which Klimt intended to ridicule his critics. In this paper, I would like to examine Judith I, an erotic femme fatale allegory painting, in comparison with women in other Klimt paintings and the cultural context of Nietzsche's and Freud's views on women to understand the manner in which Klimt essentializes the female. It turns out that this female figure is ambivalent in many aspects and that it thematically works as "a floating signifier" that may represent almost anything but a real woman. This characteristic of the female is manifest even in Klimt's society lady portrait where the erotic intimacy of the viewer to the subject's idealized femininity precedes her individuality as a person. In other words, femininity in Klimt is rather the artist's conceptual framework rather than an artistic manifestation of an experienced reality.

Judith and Holofernes, by Gustav Klimt (1901)

Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi (1612-21)

Judith and Holofernes, a.k.a. Judith I (1901) is a biblical allegory painting of a Jewish courtesan who seduced and beheaded Holofernes, the general of the enemy Assyrian army which was attacking her country. Unlike other traditional depictions which usually stressed the act of homicide, Klimt's version of Judith appears to be a contemporaneous femme fatale in an exhibitionist display of her sensual nude body with the head of Holofrenes almost entirely excluded. Her gaze is that of a daring, dangerous woman, and in that way Klimt provocatively manages to transform her from a heroine killing a man who has been overcome by his erotic inclination into a sexually-charged woman, overwhelmed by erotic feelings herself.

The confidence with which Judith projects her nude body and her direct gaze seems to challenge an otherwise voyeuristic viewer who would rather like to scrutinize her actions but suddenly find himself the object of criticism himself. This reversal of male-female sexual roles and subject-object perspectives suggests the ambivalence inherent in the supple female figure. This effect is particularly characteristic in popular depictions of the femme fatale at the turn of the century as a result of social change and the questioning of a man's role.

In the context of the popular contemporary Freudian theory of sexuality, this portrayal of the femme fatale may be associated with castration anxiety in men and penis envy in women. In particular, Klimt's Judith can be seen as posing a threat to men because if a contemporary male viewer believes in active-passive sexual relationship between men and women or in penis envy of a girl's psychology as Freud suggests, this painting to him should represent a vivid, dreary act of revenge of the woman on a man. The more radical interpretation of this image may go even further that through decapitation of her male counterpart, Judith is able to simulate castration on the man, recovers from her penis envy/castration complex and claims for herself aggressive sexual role which, according to Freud, is otherwise repressed in a normal woman, thereby becoming a man herself. Indeed if one considers Judith's wholesome body, her wide shoulders, angular jaws and full forearm, one may associate, in the Freudian context, the accentuated virility and audacity of this form with the crumbing of feminine instincts—women outgrowing their repressed sexuality—at least, if not masculinization.

However, the issue of gender identification in Judith painting appears to be more ambiguous and complicated than mere defeminization. Despite being a figure of castration which generally institutes anxiety and threatens the phallic order, this figure of the femme fatale exhibits visually a sophisticated complexion and mysterious desire. On one hand, her portrayal represents life—an awakening of female sexual instincts; but on the other, an imminent death of that same free-spirited femme fatale figure. Her raised eyebrows and audacious smile challenges and subverts the male ego; the phosphorescent hue of her skin accentuates the virility of a woman as if her pulsating body is illuminated from within and we nearly see and feel her circulating blood vessels. At the same time, her reclining eyes seem dilapidated, introverted and mysteriously sad. If her sensual erotic body suggests the vivacity of life, the painting's restrictive composition suggests an entrapment of a proud, free spirit in the moral or social confinement. Her life-like, naturalistic human form competes with the flatness of her abstract environment, mounding out like a bas relief, yet locked in compositionally and symbolically by the deep, jewel encrusted choker that integrates into the background patterns. Extreme vertical frame and over-emphasis of the flesh that fills most of the painting but leaves little space for the otherwise lush, infinitely continuous backdrop expresses a sense of confinement as these patterns compete with the edges and implies continuity and imaginary space beyond these edges. Together with the gilded frame, the painting as a whole looks like a coffin; the picture thus becomes a symbolic image in which our remembrance of this lively femme fatale is trapped eternally like a dead legend.

Klimt's use of ambivalence particularly in this female figure is powerful in conveying a sophisticated psychological state of the male artist who consciously and repeatedly generates a discourse on woman through his paintings. Back to the previous point about defeminization, when the woman—supposedly, in Freud's terms, the "passive" figure of castration, transforms herself into a lustful, "desiring" agent, she poses a threat to the phallic order and acquires subversive power. If that is true, it is also interesting to note otherwise that the masculine who is supposed to be the desiring agent in the first place does not seem to have the same mysterious power to subvert the order among themselves, otherwise Klimt need not have used the female figure to revolt. What this means is that Klimt in particular appeals to the desire for castration—the woman being inherently the already-castrated figure, rather than the male's anxiety of it. In other words, the female draws their subversive power through the absence of phallus and thus becomes the object of castration envy for Klimt. How the female obtains this power is clear when we consider the multiplicity of meanings of the female in Klimt and the ultimate lack thereof of essence and actual identity in such representations. The female's physical absence of phallus turns her into the figure of void which lends her the symbolism of an existential search for fluid meanings to fill in this void. This symbolic use of the female is shared by Nietzsche in his philosophy which provided much context of womanhood in this era.

To demonstrate, one may recall Nietzsche's claim of the mystifying concept of woman as a riddle in relation to truth in order to compare it with Klimt's treatment of the female nude in Nuda Veritas. As Nietzsche says "One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us not see her reasons? (Burgard 16)", he means on one hand, that a woman, lacking the dominant certainties of the phallus, wisely keeps the essence concealed to remain truth and nature. On the other hand, another implication of this statement is that perhaps what she conceals is not what we want to see. Klimt seems to extend the symbolism further even to the latter sense in his Nuda Veritas. He imbues her with subversive power by painting her naked, because, to a viewer, looking at an unmediated vision of the bare truth would be just as uncomfortable and improper as looking at an unabashed naked woman who stares back at oneself confrontationally as if to mock the voyeuristic nature of the male viewer. The viewer perhaps even sees a reflection of himself in the mirror that nudas veritas holds in her hand.

This similar effect of nudity and exchange of erotic gaze in Judith I reveals both sides of the relationship of desire: since she takes the head of Holofernes and has consumed his erotic energy, she becomes the desiring subject; but because she also appears in her bare, castrated body, vulnerable to the viewer's examination, she is also the object of desire—namely male's castration envy—an envy in the fluidity of the female form. Indeed, she is especially vulnerable to Klimt who, as a well-studied artist master of the erotic feminine form, has carefully visualized and rendered these expressive curves of her body. This latter aspect makes her fluid figure almost the artist's fetish—a disguise of his indulgent sexual fantasy derived from the ability to forge the woman as this or that at his caprice. In other words, however a confident and sexually-liberated woman she seems, Judith is neither free nor independent from the artist who created her. Klimt, indeed, has a dominant control over what she represents. Judith may be a subversive and threatening woman to his audience, but to the artist, she is a projection of his male ego—a woman discourse in the male perspective—insofar as she is a representation of the female as a concept rather than actual women. In other words, Klimt's lexicon of "the feminine" perversely objectifies woman by making her a non-self identity—a floating signifier which derives its power from its ambivalence and mystery as "the Other."

It is illuminating to examine the issue of woman's identity by comparing Klimt's femme fatale with the society lady—almost her personality opposite—in his other works. Consider Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) for a typical example in this genre of his, here and again, we find the female as a concept. Despite obvious identity of the sitter as the lady of a rich, successful businessman, the portrait is less a likeness than an icon and tells little about her personality. In other words, the portrait depicts the woman as a concept and seems to overlook her identity. Most of the painting is glittering artifice; the image of the feminine beauty is made ethereal by the precious materials that it embodies or evokes through its ornamentation. An impenetrable ornate surface that eclipses the sitter's body and her gown beneath repeatedly draws attention to itself and away from the sitter. This extensive decoration captures the sitter's naturalistic figure in the structure of two-dimensional ornamental areas as if it is totally immobile—an attempt to "freeze" the female figure similar to that in Judith and Holofernes.

Overall, the portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I creates an impression of wealth, influence and sensuality by means of its rich polished surface. In that sense, Klimt shows Adele Bloch-Bauer not as she really was, nor even as she might have wished herself to be, but rather as her husband, the commissioner, desired her to be seen by others. The portrait is adorned with ornament for the same reason that the sitter is adorned with jewelry that her husband gave her—not only to enhance her beauty but also to exhibit his affluence and taste. Itself one of the successful businessman's possessions, the portrait depicts another: his wife. In her second portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer II, the lady even looks like a vase, a decorative object herself. Like the way she is adorned with ornament and yet her existence is removed from it in visual effect, the lady doubly becomes a metaphor for "the feminine" that is removed spiritually from her male counterpart, but yet owned by him as a decorative object. One may even regard the composition and shape of the female figure that springs upward in these portraits as evocative of a phallus—the man's ultimate possession.

However, it is essential to note that, to Klimt, treating "the female" as an object does not necessarily mean degrading her; his purpose in doing so is otherwise—rather to elevate her as an aesthetic concept. In many of his society lady portraits including these two, Klimt paints his subject from a looked-up perspective which often reveals her slender, tall body. By extreme lengthening of some figures, the lady appears to be looking at us from a higher position and leaves before us the distance to show that she is really an exclusive society lady. Klimt seems to elevate her as an emblem of the noble soul; her naturalistic face is dignified and delicate, yet fragile and made ethereal amidst the harmony of abstract ornaments. As much as these portraits are one part of Klimt's endless projective typology of womanhood, "the female" is both the source and the representation of his aesthetic ideals.

Despite the ambivalence and multiplicity of meanings in Klimt's several portrayals of women, his paintings converge in addressing femininity as a concept. In his paintings, the woman operates not as an individual with certain identity, but rather as a figure of undecidability. The woman as a concept allows simultaneous multiplicity of identities, which itself yields non-self identity. Such discourse about woman exploits the female figure—lacking in concrete definition and outline—as a metaphor. This woman as metaphor is, to borrow Nietzsche's words, a representation twice removed—a pure and aesthetic metaphor—as opposed to the use of woman as dead metaphor in Freud. Perhaps this metaphor serves to destabilize conventional figuration of genders. In other words, we cannot see through personality of the women in Klimt's paintings due to their lack of their identity, but we can see relationship between the concept of a woman and the male artist, particularly the interplay of erotic desires among each other.

In cultural contexts, the fin-de-siecle Austria faced a growing challenge to gender conventions as the presence of women in different professions and social roles reflected the propensity for women's social and political emancipation. Adultery in the Austrian high society and rife prostitution comply with a new character of sexually assertive woman or the mysterious femme fatale. In the face of such backdrops, men tend to respond with unease and anxiety. Klimt's response is somewhat similar but yet he goes even beyond to claim womanhood for himself by using her figure to express his underlying fantastical desire for paradoxes, along which came subversive power, and pure aesthetic ideals. Klimt's depiction of women is less a matter of the female identity than a piece of evidence that Austrian society at the turn of the century had fallen short of coherence and was overwhelmed with contradictions.