Radical Interiors: Cindy Sherman's ‘Sex Pictures’ and Kathy Acker's My Mother: Demonology

Abstract

In 1989, the American visual artist Cindy Sherman produced her ‘Sex Pictures’, a number of photographic images of two medical mannequins whose bodies had been dismembered and reconstructed to form abstract configurations that alluded to pornographic poses. Sherman's series was a response to the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, in which American artists such as Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was considered obscene by the Republican Congress, were censored. Many artists in the culture-war period had their grants rescinded. The American avant-garde writer Kathy Acker published My Mother: Demonology in 1993. A prominent concern of Acker's in the work is what she termed her ‘writing freedom’ in a climate of cultural expurgation by the Republican elite. In particular, Acker was worried that she was ‘internalizing certain censorships’. This article addresses Sherman's and Acker's work in a comparative context to explore, through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva, the ways in which their responses to a climate of political censorship can be read as forms of intimate revolt. Kristeva's notion of ejection—the act of placing something beyond the scope of the possible—transpires as ‘a condition of art's creation’ in Sherman's and Acker's work. Acker and Sherman use the pornographic reference in their work to disrupt and dislocate the narrative and image from convention in order to de-eroticize the body, against heteronormativity's terms, and empower the female sex organs. Eversion—that is, in Sherman's and Acker's works, the act of turning the institutional and maternal body inside out—emerges as a mode of resistance to the danger of the writer and the artist internalizing cultural restrictions. The everted body creates a site of radical interiority which becomes the (impossible) site for the radical (re-)embodiment of the feminine subject.

Keywords:

• Cindy Sherman
• Kathy Acker
• culture wars
• Julia Kristeva
• eversion
• revolt

Notes

¹Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, trans. from the French by Jeanine Herman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1997], p. 3.

²Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, trans. from the French by Jeanine Herman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1997], p. 4.

³Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, trans. from the French by Jeanine Herman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1997], p. 5.

⁵Lawrence A. Rickels, ‘Body Bildung—Interview with Author Kathy Acker’, Artforum, 1 February 1994, p. 20.

⁴‘Cindy Sherman’, interview with Therese Lichtenstein, Journal of Contemporary Art, at www.jca-online.com/sherman.html.

⁶Hal Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, October, vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 106–124; Laura Mulvey, ‘Cosmetics and Abjection’, in Burton, Cindy Sherman, pp. 65–83.

⁷Simon Taylor, ‘The Phobic Object in Contemporary Art’, inCraig Houser (ed), Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993, pp. 59–84 (p. 59).

⁸Simon Taylor, ‘The Phobic Object in Contemporary Art’, inCraig Houser (ed), Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993, pp. 59–84 (p. 59).

⁹Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. London: MIT Press, 1996, p. 124.

¹⁰Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 261.

¹¹Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 124.

¹²Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 1.

¹³Larry McCaffery, ‘The Path of Abjection: An Interview with Kathy Acker’, in Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, pp. 14–35 (p. 24).

¹⁴Kathy Acker, Angry Women, p. 179.

¹⁶Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, London: Thames and Hudson, 2006, p. 164.

¹⁵Therese Lichtenstein, ‘Interview with Cindy Sherman’, Journal of Contemporary Arts, at http://www.jca-online.com/ ‘Cindy Sherman’, interview with Therese Lichtenstein.

¹⁷Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, London: Thames and Hudson, 2006, p. 164.

¹⁸Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, London: Thames and Hudson, 2006, p. 164.

¹⁹Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 254.

²⁰Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 260.

²¹See J.M. Bernstein, ‘The Horror of Nonidentity: Cindy Sherman's Tragic Modernism’, in Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 253–326 (p. 253).

²²Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 221.

²³Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 222.

²⁴Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose and Jean Radford, ‘Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Future of Feminism: A Conversation’, in Feminist Futures, special issue of Women 21:1, 2010, pp. 75–103 (p. 85).

²⁵Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose and Jean Radford, ‘Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Future of Feminism: A Conversation’, in Feminist Futures, special issue of Women 21:1, 2010, p. 87.

²⁶‘Cindy Sherman’, interview with Therese Lichtenstein.

²⁷Mitchell et al., ‘Psychoanalysis’, p. 88.

²⁸Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 140.

²⁹Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity, London: Pandora Press, 1990, p. 154.

³⁰Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity, London: Pandora Press, 1990, p. 162.

³¹Rickels, ‘Body Bildung’, p. 20.

³²Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, New York: Grove Press, 1993, p. 219.

³³Rickels, ‘Body Bildung’, p. 20.

³⁴Acker, My Mother, p. 12.

³⁵Acker, My Mother, p. 18.

³⁶Acker, My Mother, p. 62.

³⁷Rickels, ‘Body Bildung’, p. 20.

³⁸Acker, My Mother, p. 237.

⁴²Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 130.

³⁹Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 12.

⁴⁰Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 13.

⁴¹Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 10.

⁴⁵Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, pp. 26–7.

⁴³Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, p. 25.

⁴⁴Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, p. 26.

⁴⁷Acker, My Mother, p. 11.

⁴⁶Acker, My Mother, p. 10.

⁵⁰Acker, My Mother, p. 59.

⁴⁸Suzette Henke, ‘Oedipus Meets Sacher-Masoch: Kathy Acker's Pornographic (Anti)Ethical Aesthetic’, Contemporary Women's Writing 2:2, 2008, pp. 91–107 (p. 92).

⁴⁹Suzette Henke, ‘Oedipus Meets Sacher-Masoch: Kathy Acker's Pornographic (Anti)Ethical Aesthetic’, Contemporary Women's Writing 2:2, 2008, p. 93.

⁵¹Henke, ‘Oedipus Meets Sacher-Masoch’, p. 107.

⁵²Acker, My Mother, p. 59.

⁵⁴Acker, My Mother, p. 44.

⁵³Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 138.

⁵⁷Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 10.

⁵⁵Acker, My Mother, p. 45.

⁵⁶Rickels, ‘Body Bildung’, p. 20.

⁶⁰Acker, My Mother, p. 248.

⁵⁸Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, pp. 251, 252.

⁵⁹Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 252.

⁶¹Acker, My Mother, p. 156.

⁶²Acker, My Mother, p. 152.

⁶³Acker, My Mother, p. 14.

⁶⁴Acker, My Mother, pp. 14, 5.

⁶⁵Acker, My Mother, p. 218.

⁶⁶Acker, My Mother, p. 219.

⁶⁷Acker, My Mother, p. 259.

⁶⁸Acker, My Mother.

⁶⁹Acker, My Mother, p. 260.

⁷⁰Acker, My Mother, pp. 258, 267.

⁷¹Acker, My Mother, p. 268.

⁷²Sherman, Retrospective, p. 164.