Iker Veiga

“Erotica… Romance…” ¹ : On Judy Chicago’s Love Story

 
Only the one that hurts you
Can make you feel better
Only the one that inflicts the pain
Can take it away ²



    Madonna’s lyrics reverberate in my mind as I step away from Judy Chicago’s Love Story. In Erotica, the opening track of her homonymously titled album, the artist explores BDSM imagery and owns up to her sexuality by presenting herself as a dominatrix – a persona referred to as “Ditta” throughout the project.³ This LP and its accompanying photography book – appropriately titled Sex – were received poorly by audiences and critics alike: Madonna’s subversive endeavor was deemed overly racy and vulgar, causing an (almost) irredeemable drop in her sales and success, and securing her a star in the vilified female pop idol walk of fame.⁴ Not only does this instance evince the systemic censorship women in the public eye are subjected to, but it also exposes the underlying gender dynamics linked to pornographic material, as well the gendered structure that is widely ingrained into sadomasochistic exchanges. Why was – and to this day, still is – a woman’s assertion of sexual freedom and dominance over men received with such a wave of commotion? Is the public response similar when sadomasochistic pornographic imagery replicates patriarchal structures? In the midst of this internal monologue, I find myself gravitating to Chicago’s work again looking for answers to these queries.

    The composition of this piece is divided into two: a violent x-ray filtered photograph occupies the top half of the picture frame, while a fragment of text extends below. In the image above, we witness a body being penetrated by a gun from behind. The genitals are concealed by the filtering of the image, but its brutality is emphasized through that same inversion of negative tonalities: the inner part of the body’s legs shine, directing our view upwards towards the gun, which stands in the center of the piece white as a morning star. The practice depicted in the image is brutal – its mere conduction makes the viewer doubt its consent –, and stands as a visual metaphor which ought to be completed through a close reading of the text below. This excerpt belongs to Pauline Réage’s erotic novel The Story of O⁵,and in spite of its brevity, it encapsulates the main themes explored in the novel: the derivation of erotic power from feminine objectification and the search for the root of sadomasochistic inclinations.⁶ When juxtaposed with the text, which acts as a caption, the piece can thus be understood as an attempt to translate Réage’s exploration of erotica into an image, capturing an explicit intimate moment between a woman, and the man that subjugates her, according to the heterosexual relationship described in Réage’s story.

   Nevertheless, I believe that Chicago’s work stands as a denunciation of the objectification of women in the media, instead of a celebration of the erotic power derived from sadomasochistic practices. Through her juxtaposition of imagery and text, she presents the viewer with a bifocal understanding of pornography: the x-rays, both emphasize negative space and direct the viewer towards the darkest corner (both visually and thematically: the anus) of the image, and act as a visual metaphor for Chicago’s overarching goal in this piece. Whereas Madonna adopts a dominant position as she sings “there is a certain satisfaction, in a little bit of pain,”⁷ vindicating female sexual freedom by subverting the submissiveness assigned to women culturally, through her exploration Chicago seeks to unveil the power dynamics that enable the brutalization of women in porn through a literal scanning of representations of nakedness in the media and a search for the origin of this abusive practice. Here, the artist ponders about the ways in which fictitious representations of abusive sex permeate the real life dynamics women are subjected to and exploited through.
   
   In this piece, multiple individuals are involved in the construction of an all-encompassing meaning: the represented subjects, both the male participant who points a gun at the female’s genitalia, and the spectator. The audience plays a fundamental role in this piece’s dialogue: its presence is reiterated by the need to connect both fragmented halves intellectually and to contextualize the piece. However, in this work, the female figure doesn’t reciprocate the audience’s looks. As defined by John Berger in his study of representations of the naked body in art in Ways of Seeing, the model is deprived of her psychological dimension because of “the erasure of any recognizable facial features,” her face being cut out from the photographic frame⁸. In Love Story the woman has stopped being a person in order to become a complete sexual object: she is an artifice. Paradoxically, because of the brutality and extent of this identificatory dissociation, the violence of the action is accentuated, reducing the pleasure that the viewer derives from the pornographic nature of the work. While Madonna’s character Ditta embodies a hyperbole of BDSM dominant subjects, Chicago explores the limits of sexual drive via an exaggeration of the processes of dehumanization in force in art in order to inhibit this body’s sexo-monetary value and cauterize the viewer’s libido, forcing them to face that there is  “something wrong” with this denaturalizing tradition. Consequently, this piece reflects the power dynamics that condition the surveillance of women and manifests them both internally and formally, but doesn’t delve into the sadomasochistic dialectic in the same way Madonna’s roleplay does.
 
   The inclusion of the excerpt further denotes the violent deprivation of humanness O (if the model’s enactment of the main character in Réage’s novel is assumed) undergoes in the story. In her piece Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag juxtaposes the objectivity of war photography with Goya’s subjective depictions of war crimes in 19th Century Spain in his War Disasters series to describe the role that captioning plays in photography. In her comparison, the photographer allegedly captures his own sight through the lenses, while in the case of Goya’s art, the presence of text stands as an attempt for the artist to specify his role in the violent exchange (“Yo lo vi” (which translates to “I saw it.”)) In the series, but particularly in this work, Goya depicts his memories of war crimes as he “saw” them. The naked eye of a painter lacks the precision of a camera obscura, therefore, he justifies his legitimacy as a witness by including captions that locate him in relation to the themes depicted. Through this collection, he interweaves literature and visual arts in order to craft an approximation of the horror hewitnessed during the war.
       
   Expanding on this device, Chicago’s use of captions is grounded in a literary narration –fiction–, instead of a personal recounting of facts. In Love Story, the literary and the experiential become one. The artist anchors the image in a realm of fantasy, visibly questioning the reality of the events depicted in her work. She evinces the artificiality of her work through her manipulation and filtering of the original photograph: in spite of furthering the provocative nature of the image at hand, assaulting “the sensibilities of the viewer”⁹, this contradicts Sontag’s assumption that “the photographer saw it” suggesting that there must have “been some tampering or misrepresenting"¹⁰ done to the image during its production. The image is only grounded in reality because of the response it awakens in viewers –the visual and the literary come together by virtue of the rejection they provoke in the audience. Therefore, Love Story can be understood as a collapse of the “traditionally neutral informative” nature of captions, and the use of photography as a recording medium. It bridges the gap between content and form to address the viewer’s rawest emotional response, we become “voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look”¹¹. Chicago proposes literary texts as an epistemological tool to understand processes of assimilation of information, ultimately pointing at the exchanges that take place between fiction, reality, and its study and classification: the archive.

   The artist acknowledges the relevance of the archive as she underscores her need to use the information she “had about [her] own struggle, [and her] own perceptions” in her work although “[she] understood that the structure as it existed in the art world and the world as a whole had no provisions for that kind of information”¹². Thus, her work may be interpreted as a response to the exclusion of female artists, perspectives, and works from the mainstream “master narrative” of art. Accordingly, in Love Story, through the conversation initiated by the manipulation of her photograph, and its connection to Réagan’s excerpt, she explicitly acknowledges to both reference historical representations of women in art, and to attempt to break them apart, elevating unorthodox materials such as erotic narrative texts to the level ofestablished patriarchal scholarship, and studying the ways in which these sources bleed into Chicago’s “tremendous need for identifying with women”¹³ is evident throughout her work, her choice of Réagan’s text not being arbitrary. By quoting an erotic novel, a genre heavily associated with female readers who use its raunchy imagining as a way to escape their daily duties, she brings up the way in which these narratives modulate women’s behaviors and structurally prepare them to subdue their needs to those of their male partners. The title of the piece in itself, references the perpetuation of these exchanges through literary fiction: a seemingly innocent, fairy-like Love Story may hide a tortuous background of ingrained masculine abuse which is passed generationally, ultimately shaping women to be submissive and obey men (both sexually and socially). Alarmed by this gendered brainwashing, through Love Story Chicago defends that the fantasy–the stories–which are used to objectify women in fiction must be re-evaluated and incorporated into the archive. Both female fantasization about their own bodies, as well as the imaginings regarding their oppression must be represented and analyzed in order to revise the artistic canon and propel tangible change in both art criticism, and its ramifications into society.

   In order to revert the dynamics reproduced in BDSM and pornographic materials the archive needs to be deconstructed and historiographical evidence must be built upon subalternity. Through her radical brutalization and dehumanization of sadomasochistic imagery, Chicago forces the audience to reframe the ways in which custom informs the perpetuation of oppressive structures, and promotes the inclusion of subaltern fictional accounts into the archive to bridge the ways in which the media and reality contest each other. In contrast with Madonna’s performance, which directly reverted gender roles, Judy Chicago’s replicates them in order to satirize them: prior to the diversification of sexual practices and their archive, Love Story points at the necessity of critically revising oppressive structures in order to challenge them. Chicago’s piece triumphantly laughs at the male viewer, mockingly asking “now, what?” as she dismantles the pornographic standard.

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¹ Madonna. “Erotica.” Track 1 on Erotica. Sire Records Company, 1992, CD
² Ibid
³ Ibid
⁴ Segarra, Edward. “Madonna’s ‘erotica’ Showed That Sex Doesn’t Always Sell. but It Can Move the Needle.” USA
Today, October 23, 2022. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/10/20/madonna-erotica-empowered-women-sing-about-sex/8204596001/
⁵ “Salon 94: Love Story by Judy Chicago.” Salon 94 | Love Story by Judy Chicago. Accessed December 3, 2023.
https://salon94.com/artists/judy-chicago/artworks/love-story/
⁶ Bedell, Geraldine. “I Wrote the Story of O.” The Guardian, July 24, 2004.
⁷ Madonna. “Erotica.” Track 1 on Erotica. Sire Records Company, 1992, CD https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/25/fiction.features3.
⁸ Ibid
⁹ Ibid pg. 4
¹⁰ Ibid pg. 5 
¹¹ Ibid pg. 2
¹² Chicago, Judy and Schapiro, Miriam. “A Feminist Art Program,” Art Journal 31.1(1971): 48
¹³ Ibid 

Bibliography

Bedell, Geraldine. “I Wrote the Story of O.” The Guardian, July 24, 2004.
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/25/fiction.features3


Berger, John. “Chapter 3”. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1973, pp. 45-64

Chicago, Judy and Schapiro, Miriam. “A Feminist Art Program,” Art Journal 31.1(1971): 48-9

Madonna. “Erotica.” Track 1 on Erotica. Sire Records Company, 1992, CD

“Salon 94: Love Story by Judy Chicago.” Salon 94 | Love Story by Judy Chicago. Accessed
    December 3, 2023. https://salon94.com/artists/judy-chicago/artworks/love-story/


Segarra, Edward. “Madonna’s ‘erotica’ Showed That Sex Doesn’t Always Sell. but It Can Move
    the Needle.” USA Today, October 23, 2022.
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/10/20/madonna-erotica-empowered-women-sing-about-        sex/8204596001/

Sontag, Susan. “Chapter 3”. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003