Feminist artists have been standing on shifting critical terrain for sometime. We have been surrounded by texts instructing us in the strategies of necessary exclusions and compelling inclusions in the attempt to represent female bodies, their sexuality and subjectivity. Many artists have found themselves caught between essentialist and deconstructive points of view and between not wanting to give up our personal identity and autonomy, after struggling for so long to make it visible, and wanting to participate in a more inclusive and politically viable way.

Recent theory and criticism have placed the creator of images in a difficult and challenging position. To attempt to reconstruct a sense of the real, knowing that all attempts are subject to deconstruction and are tainted by time and place, and given the shifting relations of uttering and utterance, requires a well developed sense of irony. one way to think of the fragility of our grasp of reality is to acknowledge an "enlightened false consciousness," an openness of language that anticipates its own inevitable transforming participation in a changing world.

Many feminist artists have responded to new critical theory with efforts to block the illusion of a decontextualized voyeuristic gaze. Joan Semmel painted herself from the position of viewing her body not as we see it, but as she sees it directly, without mirrors. Cindy Sherman represented herself in many guises that reiterate various social constructions of female stereotypes, but denied us her "real" identity." This lack of an authentic verifiable female body served to silhouette the currently available, socially constructed essentialisms, while absenting the subject.

Mary Kelly steeped herself in the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in an attempt to map women's psyches and desires. Her work, which makes use of texts and simple objects, evokes a sense of women's psychic presence by their physical absence.

Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holtzer are indebted to the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard's strategy of resisting the commodification of life by adopting forms of resistance that serve to accelerate that very process, turning it upon itself. In their work, they use conventional Madison Avenue media constructs to subvert commercial messages. However, this may prove to have been all too complicit in providing heightened vigor to commodification by becoming little more than an alternative marketing strategy.

Nancy Spero's work brought victimhood to the surface and confronted her viewers with powerful images of humiliation and pain. Recently, Spero, along with Joyce Krosloff, have used pornographic images in their work. Spero continues to confront and interrogate the gaze rather than block it. Krosloff's saturated surface of coupled couples forms patterns that satiate rather than arouse desires.

The abundance of theory-driven art, by artists such as these, establishes an important critique and points to important correctives. However, the ability of this work to be contained within a relatively narrow, modernist aesthetic, particularly contemporary modernists' emphasis upon the very possibility of an establishment-based avant garde, may in fact discourage the wider pluralism that these very efforts have stimulated.

Of course, feminist artists should accept responsibility for their images, even if the attribution of meaning or use cannot always be controlled. As part of this, we should engage critical issues in a theoretically intelligent and articulate way. It seems obvious that there are many things about which we must inform ourselves while attempting to re-create female subjectivity and, as part of that, female sexuality. However, this does not mean that we have to make art that is exclusively or even predominantly cognitive. We must also risk trusting our sometimes non-rational, intuitive, and often ambiguous visions. This might be termed "informed intuition," a self-conscious practice which involves the need to maintain a fidelity to the urgency of our images while understanding that they will change as our consciousness changes. I don't believe we can or should attempt to create a universally recognizable interpretation of female sexuality and subjectivity, but we can continue to commit ourselves, individually, by adding our personal views which will offer many diverse, mutually referencing, representations.

Like the artist, viewers also can't arrive at some permanent construction of desire, nor can they be forced to respond in terms of the artist's construction of desire anymore than critical discourses will come to some final end. The agency of the spectator in the on-going production of meaning must be acknowledged. We are in the process of witnessing and should be participating in the creation of new kinds of viewers who operate in the context of new kinds of "uses and gratifications," as well as their own informed intuitions.

We've had enough of unity through domination, and the problem of acknowledging differences without constituting opposition may be what feminism is all about, i.e. by basing our work on ideas of equality, interdependence, and inclusion.

The problem of representing female sexuality is not that of the artist alone. In a social setting where the sexual becomes isolated as a category and is not integrated into the life of the person who desires or seduces it becomes difficult to subvert prevailing objectifications. Too often our culture has limited the sexual to closely confined quarters--the bedroom, "sexy lingerie," night-time, nudity, and genitalia. Most individuals experience sexual desire and activity in many more complex ways. There is, however, some usefulness in representing sexuality explicitly. Seeing images of people engaged in sexual activity may have positive consequences; it demystifies sexual behavior, freeing some of dread and fear, helping others get over the idea sex is "bad."

Current understanding of sexual behavior (Simon, 1989) suggests that a diversity of motives and experiences may be associated with otherwise identical sexual behaviors, just as many with identical configurations of desire may realize desire in a diversity of expressions. As a result, it is important not to be overly impressed with the constancies and regularities of the body and recognize the variety of uses to which the body may be put. For the contemporary artist and viewer, it cannot merely be a question of how to represent the sexual; we must also address the question of how to represent what the sexual represents. Images of sexual potency derive from many sources; both public and private sexual cultures flourish. As the late Robert Stoller (1989) once observed, "what ordinary persons might think about while engaging in sexual intercourse is often "enough to make a monkey's hair stand on end."

The difficulty in representing desire and the erotic emotion is not unlike efforts to represent pain and religious feeling; all involve the problematic of representing what the represented represents. All three of these dimensions of emotional experience come together in the work of Frida Kahlo. Kahlo, born in Mexico in 1907, died forty-seven years later, in 1954. Her discourse of the body makes visible the otherwise opaque and intertwined feelings of pain, spirituality, and sexuality. She used nature metaphorically and called upon Christian symbols as well as the images of her Indian ancestors. Her spine was seriously injured in a bus accident when she was sixteen. Subsequently, she had several abortions and miscarriages, as well as other surgery. Tears and blood often display her psychic and physical pain. In one painting a broken columns stands as a metaphor for her broken and tortured spine. Most of her work is self-referential and she is specific and particular in her renderings.

Two of her paintings present images of bodily processes never seen before in Western culture. [Slide One] My Birth is a small painting done on sheet metal, it is 15 1/4 by 5 1/2 and was painted in 1932, a year after her mother's death. Not only does it frankly confront the actual process of giving birth, it also evokes myriad emotional responses to that event. The shrouded head of the mother appears as if dead while giving birth. The small painting of the Mater Delorosa or Virgin of Sorrows, who is pierced by seven daggers, in a frame over the bed, refers to Ex Votos or small offerings of thanksgiving given to saints in a time of crisis. Could she only begin to live after her mother's death? Did they ever bond? Did she ever separate?

Five years later, she painted [Slide two] My Nurse and Me. As you can see, she is still working on attachment/detachment from her mother. The painting is very different from any traditional image of a Madonna and Child. The maternal figure wears a Teotihucan mask/face and again the infant Frida has an adult head. There is no emotional connection between the mother and child, instead nature, in the form of milk raining from the sky and dripping from the beautiful fractile pattern of the ancestor's enlarged milk glands and ducts offers nurturance.

Kahlo was very involved in the Mexican revolution and participated in trying to claim indigenous art as part of the new nationalism. Perhaps her painting represents more than the personal complications she experienced with her own mother. Perhaps she claims an ancient ancestor as nurturer of a new society. Because of my limited time, I will resist further discussion of Kahlo's paintings and only say that I think her open-ended practice of using metaphoric realism in a crosshistorical, multi-cultured and politically informed way offers feminist artists an interesting process.

[Slide three] My painting entitled Growth was done in 1974, four years before I saw my first Frida Kahlo painting. It has been a long time project of mine to give women power, a subjectivity that offers psychic and physical presence. I paint specific people, who generally confront their viewers. I describe the work as "metaphor realism." The metaphor here is one of a tree. The figure is growing upwards, branching out, bearing fruit and the fruit is transformed. But it is also ambiguous and open to other interpretations. The woman as cuckold is one and the erotic lick of the young deer on the woman's thigh evokes an immediate sexual response. She grows with both love and pain.

In his essay "The Primacy of Perception," Merleau-Ponty (1964) reminds us that we never cease to live in the world of perception in our bodies. obviously critical thinking goes beyond the body, sometimes leading us to forget the role of the body in the constituting of our ideas of reality. Critical thinking often encounters only theories which it expands, accepts, or rejects. The body is on the side of the subject; it is our point of view and, until we radically mutate, it remains the place from which we view the world and take on a specific cultural situation. From an artist's position, the way spatial forms and distances are managed is in relationship to the body. It is from the body that we grasp external stimuli and transform realities. When we designate a point in space with our finger, we are asserting our factual situation as a particular subject already installed in virtual space and pointing--prolonging our finger into cultural space. [Slide four] Painting with a brush is a similar kind of extension, one that has the possibility of creating images that are taken from inside the mind and placing them outside in virtual space. The same images having come to the inside from perceptions gathered from outside. This produces what Merleau-Ponty refers to as a "carnal essence," an external equivalent of internal perceptions. This painting, a double self-portrait, was done in 1981 and is called Caught Between Night Suns. It is 5811 X 46". When I am painting a figure with my brush, I can feel in my own body that part of the body my brush touches. A visceral relationship occurs. I think that art and life are interchangeable; I do not make art about art. The internal vision I had was of me sitting in a pool of blood in the desert at night. At this point in my life I felt caught between my roles as artist and mother, between nature and culture. My brush touches my lifeline. Despite this, the figures in this painting were viewed by many as objects. Somewhere in the 80s I no longer felt I could paint a nude female body and empower it with subjectivity, even if it was a self-portrait, the obvious way for a woman artist to make herself a subject.

(Slide five] The title of this painting is "Me Waxing" and was done in 1984. When asked to be part of an exhibition entitled

"Self-Images," I asked myself how I saw myself then and the image of a seventeen year cicada came to mind. I had just completed several years of psychotherapy and I had discovered things about myself that had, like the cicada, been buried for a long time. I knew these discoveries or recoveries would change my life and help me fly, but they felt new--wet and gooey--they would have to dry before I could take off. Painting out of this personal psychological perspective was also beginning to feel limiting to me. I do think the metaphoric use of a somewhat grotesque insect form de-eroticized the body and expanded the psychic field. It seems important to note that reading metaphors requires participation, not just appreciation on the part of viewers. I am an image maker, not a manipulator of materials. To me the self-sufficiency of the poetic idea is not indifferent to technique, but technique is only important for the directness and adequacy with which it expresses the content.

(Slide six] The Shepherdess was painted in 1989. It is 46" X 58". Although the Shepherdess is a specific person and friend, she represents a turn in my work toward a relatively open "acting out" of my concerns for larger social and political issues. Post-structuralist critics were asking important questions. Who is speaking for whom? From what position are they speaking? Who is silenced? By whom? This painting is not just a delving and probing of psychic realities, although to me she represents that too. Emily has had several psychotic episodes and partially I wanted to empower her to chase her demons away. Greed is how I think of these bloody-headed hyenas with their green neckties which are marked by dollar signs. The Shepherdess, woman, must be strong enough to resist or expose what our city-states have produced, while protecting the environment and the innocence of those who have no voice. I think we need to create images that confront, defy, and intervene in the values of a market-driven culture colonized by bigbusiness. I hope this painting is a charged encounter with that culture.

Postmodern deconstructions have opened up a space for different realities; magical realism, marvelous realism and metaphorical realism all offer an alternative vision. If the real must be other, and if we live between realities in a contingent universe, and if we search for deep structure below the surface (not mask and commodity stereotypes), we will find the world has qualities of multiplicity, ambiguity, contingencies, ironies, surprises, and multifaceted complexities that cannot be reduced, abstracted, or smoothed over, qualities that sustain many different realities.

[Slide seven] This painting, called Cyborg, is 36" X 26", and was done in 1989, the year I read what was for me a very important essay by Donna Haraway (1985) in The Socialist Review. It was entitled, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs." In it she talks about the new cybernetic technologies of perception and operation that break down boundaries in ways that make the marginal central. She refers to a new science fiction, new nonessentialist post-enlightenment visions, practices and projects. She believes in an impending paradigm shift, one that produces a style-less style, one that offers new relationships with the self and others that go beyond connections of blood, race, or sex. It is a vision of the self mutating towards otherness; that, like a virus, marks a boundary or limit beyond which reason cannot go. For her, as for other post-modernist feminists, the task is how to understand and reconstitute the self, gender, knowledge, social relations, and culture without resorting to linear, teleological, hierarchical, holistic, or binary ways of thinking. The last line of her essay is, "I"d rather be a cyborg than a Goddess." The borderlands between human, animal, and technology, between the cosmos, machines, and an earthscape offer rich possibilities. The woman in this painting is Chinese. She can be read as a third world person who is half animal, half machine; she is a scientist, an artist, a shaman. The stylized D.I.P. switches of an integrated circuit board on her chest represent the controls and possibilities of connecting with the galaxies which have been generated in the great computer in the sky. In the central panel Einstein's formula for relativity is written as well as a partial equation seen in chaos theory. A game of tic-tac-toe has been played with the symbols for female and male and the women have won. The pyramid on the desert reinforces the historical shape of the Great Sphinx which forms the contours of the Cyborg.

This painting [Slide eight), done in 1991 (58" x 72") has three titles, The first is The Daphnes and relates to the old myth of a woman, Daphne, turning into a tree while being pursued by Apollo. The second title is A Radical Avoidance of the Male Gaze and refers both to our desire not to be looked at as mere objects and not to represent or expose ourselves to that view.

The creatures wandering the forest floor are some of the extinct specimens found in the Burgess Shale, described in Stephen Jay Gould's (1989) Wonderful life. Had they survived, and it appears is if by chance alone they did not, we would be structured quite differently. The pink ones with multiple limbs are called halucigenia. And the third title is Dickheads are Extinct. I like the idea of an excess of wacky and loony detail which is informed by rather sophisticated concepts, a kind of informed naivete which is also a common sub-text to postmodernisms.

[Slide nine) The final, and most recent, painting is called Presiding. It was finished in the fall of 1991 and is 58" X 46". It now seems to me that we should not avoid representing our bodies, to do so is to deny their existence and presence. We can use the body as a location capable of containing multiple meanings. We can use our heritages across cultural and historical lines and re-work them, attack them, revise them, expose and subvert them. In this painting, history, the Calavera figure, holds on. The possibility of living with tradition without succumbing to it, without losing autonomy and freedom of choice--freedom to burn our nests is present, as marked by the rising Phoenix. The crossed arms and closed thighs are selfcontaining, resisting the eroticized gaze; in contrast, the sensuousness of the landscape and the women's flesh, along with the confident look in her eyes, avoid estrangement. Our bodies have material presence and are currently the site of many different battles in our society for power and domination. These bodies are still subject to desire, disease, violence, and distortion. We must preside over our own bodies, choices and representations. I have an unfailing belief in the power of representation to bear symbolic meanings.

In my work, I am trying to reclaim female subjectivity by being specific and particularizing with my subjects, by trying to create metaphoric realities that contextualize my personal views and paint with a phenomenological experience of the body, a kind of empathic introspection, i.e. trying to pierce the subjectivity of the other by experiencing the other in yourself.

I believe that a multifaceted, non-reductive attitude toward the inclusion of many different forms of expression is inherent in the continuing feminist process of searching for representations of our sexuality and subjectivity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gould, Stephen J. 1989 Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W.W. Norton: New York.

Haraway, Donna 1985 "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review: 80.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1964 The Primacy of Perception. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL.

Simon, William 1989 "The Postmodernization of Sex," Psychology and Sexual Behavior, 2(l): 9-37.

Stoller, Robert J. 1989 "Eros and Polis: What Is This Thing Called Love." (Unpublished Manuscript)