I AM WOMAN
Whose body is it anyway, asks Egyptian artist Ghada Amer. By Pearl Boshomane
Artist Ghada Amer draws the feminine form with powerful lines, writes Pearl Boshomane
‘THE woman’s body is a political battlefield.” Artist Ghada Amer is discussing the female body and its politicisation over a cup of Earl Grey. We’re at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, and Amer — who is visiting South Africa as part of the group exhibition “Africans in America” — is quite vocal about the amount of control society and politics try to have over women. Whose body is it anyway?
Born in Egypt to a family of four girls, Amer moved to France at the age of 11 before settling in New York City in the 1990s, where she still lives. In a book on Amer’s body of work, arts writer and curator Maura Reilly says that her “travels between cultures allowed her to witness women’s crosscultural subjugation”.
And yet there is something rather empowering about her art, which almost heavily features the naked female form, often during self-pleasure, simultaneously erotic and powerful.
The women depicted by Amer do not need a man’s involvement in their pleasure: women such as the one in 2009’s bent over, naked, looking at the viewer while she pleasures herself with anal beads; or the two women in Lisa and Britney (also from 2009) who are kissing each other delicately.
It’s the taking back of pornography from something mainly for male pleasure — the female form reserved exclusively for the male gaze — becoming something more intimate and personal. Women stripping off their clothes and pleasuring themselves for their own enjoyment and nobody else’s.
“I am not interested in making art that has a direct message,” says Amer. “I’m making my art for myself, to come upon a realisation of some important ideas, like sexuality. For me that was a very important thing to think about because I grew up in a . . . society where we were not allowed to think about sexuality — it was taboo.”
Her art might be personal, but it’s also political.
She says: “My art is completely political, but I do not want to impose my political view on the viewer.” What she does want the viewer to recognise, firstly, is the beauty of it.
“It’s very important to me how I make my art. It has to look good, it has to be beautiful, it has to have resonance with art history, it has to come in the language of art. I don’t use the language of politics or brainwashing people, or slogans. I’m not interested in politics, but my art is political. I’m battling on another level.”
Amer paints, but she also embroiders. (“Embroidery,” writes Reilly, is “a medium taken up by feminist artists since the 1970s as a political tool.”) While some have found her sensual art shocking or controversial, it’s perhaps made even more so by the usage of a skill often associated with nice old ladies making decorative cushions for their grandkids (although embroidery did have a hipster moment a few years ago, where the young and hip were stitching deers or owls for fun).
Does it matter to her how her work is received? “I want people to like it and to like me and to buy it,” she laughs. “I’m a human.” Then says, seriously: “But if they don’t like it there’s nothing I can do about it.”
She’s picked apart fairy tales, too.
SO why the female form? “I’ve always liked to draw women. It’s very strange because I don’t think that we choose the subject — I think the subject chooses you.
“I had to deal with my own fears and questions [regarding sexuality], that’s why I was drawn to draw the woman’s body since day one at school.
“You don’t know why when you start, you just have to follow your instinct and then it develops, it leads you. Your instinct will lead you to something important if you know how to listen to it.”
Her surroundings and experiences have also heavily influenced what she does and how she does it.
“The Egyptian and French were the reason I became as interested in the female body as I am. I think if I had grown up in America I would not have made the same kind of work.
“When I first came to America, I thought America was very free in terms of the body, in terms of sexuality, but I discovered that America has much more in common with the Arab society than the European.”
She says: “I thought America was the free world and then I realised [their reality] is not the freedom that they are exporting. The image that they want us to see, when you go within it, is very closed, sexuality is taboo.
“It was very interesting in terms of when people want to label my art as Muslim, as though we are backward people. There’s a problem far beyond one group, one race, one religion.
“Europe in general has transcended religious morality more than the Americans. Even now America is still talking about abortion and abortion rights, which is unthinkable for me.
“In Egypt last month they were debating female genital mutilation in parliament. Still! They were saying it is good for men because Egyptian men cannot control their sexuality.”
But Amer’s work is not just about sex. Her 1991 embroidered series Cinq Femmes au Travail featured women in the different roles women are expected to play: mother, cleaner, shopper and cook.
“What I wanted to achieve was the ultimate political act, which is beyond the woman’s body. It’s to ascribe women in art history. When I was at school, we didn’t study any woman artists. Everybody is a man. Don’t tell me there’s not one woman of importance in the 16th and 17th centuries. We only start to see women in the late 19th century. And then in the 20th century there’s five, because apparently painting has been invented by men.”
Amer started stitching over paintings as a statement. “I use the needle and the thread in order to make a mark on and to mock the painting, to mix the two together. I don’t even like sewing. Women have been totally wiped off the map [of classic art].”
But whatever you do, don’t call her a “female artist”. It perpetuates an othering, as though art is an exclusively male activity.
As personal as her work is, Amer wants her art to have the same effect on its viewers as music has on its listeners. “There is something very soothing in music,” she says. “If my art can be as soothing as music, I will be very happy.”