by Jen Graves
This is the sign on the door of the Jake gallery for Amelia Saul's exhibition this month. It makes perfect sense, but just as easily could say, "The world often contains terrible cruelty that gets covered up in museums and galleries. Don't expect that here." JG
Several years ago on a trip to Paris, I searched the walls of the famed Musee d'Orsay to find the 1866 painting of a vagina that I knew to be there.
Finally, in Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), there was no coverup, no fig leaf. That dark hair! That thumb in the eye of polite society! (And two thousand years of art history.*)
If this painting had been unceremoniously advertised on the billboard in the middle of my childhood town—if an image of an essential body part rather than of a bank or a fast-food burger were the norm—then I'd have a very different life.
Along with my thrill was dismay, and my dismay was protective. The woman attached to this vagina has only spread thighs and a white torso and breasts. She's cut off at the neck. She has no face to look back at us and no feet to run. She was painted by a man and the painting was owned by men. Same as it ever was.
I stood there an extra long time, looking between her legs with love and admiration, blocking her from view while other people probably just saw me as a pervert. I didn't really want to leave her there.
I wish I'd had a camera and secretly filmed my experience that day, or on any of the days I wandered around the major museums of France and Italy as a quiet 20-year-old American woman. Or I wish I'd had Amelia Saul's new film at the Jake, Empire of Empires. In the film, two women are behind a camera surreptitiously filming as they walk through museums in Italy and France along with the rest of the crowds. You go to these museums to ogle Napoleon's riches and the decomposing bodies of mummies stolen from Egypt, to celebrate a whole history of European domination and plunder.
Yeah, a room like this is a headscratcher. A still from Amelia Saul's Empire of Empire, 2016, at the Jake gallery at the University of Washington. JG
Saul, a New York artist who was in Seattle recently for a residency at the University of Washington, wrote the script for Empire of Empires. Two actors do the performing. They are, notably, never seen. Female invisibility is both a tool for navigating male power and a sign of male power.
The women are a couple, but a whispering one. They toy continuously with pushing at the edges of what they're "allowed" to do. One has brought along her brother's ashes and sprinkles them on the priceless valuables when nobody is looking. The other wonders whether her girlfriend is "really" a lesbian since the girlfriend is hiding their relationship from her mother.
While exploring the conditions of their own solidarity, the women move like a snaky underground worming its way through a bedrock of wealth and status, weakening it just a little from the inside.
Saul has three videos and a series of photograms at the Jake. I don't understand the role of the photograms, and one of the videos is a masturbation loop I find obvious and dull. But I watched the 32-minute Empire of Empires twice and want to see it again. When that piece finishes, the screen goes dark and the video in the other room of the gallery begins. (This is great choreography: no sound bleed, a respecting of my time.)
What's in the other video room is a guilty pleasure. It's called The First Time, and it begins with the scene of a small, calm party. A group of people are chatting over drinks at someone's house when one is urged to stand and sing a song.
In a short three minutes, the scene becomes as ridiculous and disturbed as the euphemisms for sex and power that are built into old love ballads. Have you ever considered the lyrics in "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," and the fact that it was written by a man but meant to be sung by a woman?
How do we walk through men's museums, or sing men's songs, as women? It's absurd is what it is, and we do it every day, so we forget. Until somebody's hair catches on fire, as it does in The First Time. Everything's all fine and good, nothing to see here, until somebody gets hurt, and then we all scream and the camera goes dark.
*"...for nearly two thousand years the classic female nude, virtually by definition, could be depicted neither with pubic hair nor with genitalia, a convention invented by the Greeks and observed until well into the nineteenth century."—Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble