The missing wit(h)ness: Monroe, fascinance and the unguarded intimacy of being dead

ABSTRACT

In 1985 journalist Anthony Summers published a post-mortem photograph of Marilyn Monroe, titling it ‘Marilyn in death’, in his book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (1985), which investigated the theory that her death was not suicide. The photograph thus acquired forensic significance. My questions are these: Is there an inevitable transgression and even violence in the exposure of an image of a dead woman such as we find in Summers’ and other publications? Under the rubric of this collection, unguarded intimacy, I address a set of paintings made from the morgue photograph of a derelict Marilyn Monroe in the era of feminist ethics by two painters, Margaret Harrison (b.1940) and Marlene Dumas (b. 1953). What are the material and theoretical possibilities of creating feminist e(a)ffects in re-workings of this stolen image if we can distinguish between the forensic notion of the silent witness (the pathologist performing an autopsy whose aftermath this photograph in the morgue indexes) and a concept derived from the Matrixial aesthetics of artist-theorist Bracha Ettinger – aesthetic wit(h)nessing? Can such aesthetic wit(h)nessing deflect the unguarded intimacy of seeing an unattended body in its absolute helplessness by inciting compassion?

KEYWORDS:

• Marilyn Monroe
• aesthetic wit(h)nessing
• death
• feminist fascinance
• photography
• mourning
• compassion
• painting
• corpse
• death

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note on contributor

Art historian, feminist theorist and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds, England. Her many books and articles address feminist, postcolonial and queer challenges to art history and elaborate feminist cultural theory. Her current interests focus on trauma and aesthetic transformation, feminist interventions in psychoanalytical aesthetics, cultural memory and the Holocaust, totalitarianism and the concentrationary memory, and the problematic memory of feminism. Her recent publications include After-affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester University Press, 2013) and Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and Bracha Ettinger in the Freud Museum (Leeds: Wild Pansy Press with the Freud Museum, 2013) http://www.wildpansypress.com. She is editor of Visual Politics and Psychoanalysis: Art & the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures (I B Tauris 2013) and with Max Silverman, co-editor of Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Popular Culture (2013) and Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (2015). Her forthcoming publications include Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale University Press, 2017), Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (Verso, 2018), and edited with Anna Johnson Bracha Ettinger: The Matrixial Reader (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Her book on titled Monroe’s Mov(i)es will appear in 2018–2019.

Notes

1. Between the composition and finalization of this article, a controversy has raged over a painting, exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York by European-American artist Dana Schutz. Her painting is made from a photograph of the open casket of a murdered 14-year-old African-American Emmett Till in 1955. At that date, the young man’s parents released to the press the photograph of their standing before their son’s open casket revealing his horribly wounded face in order to expose the unbearable and hideous violence done to the young man by his white murderers, who were acquitted at their trial but later confessed to the crime in a magazine interview. Despite attempts to re-open the case, it was stalled by the statute of limitations. Yet the case, and the image, acquired new urgency in the context of current murders of young Black men by the police and the Black Lives Matter campaign. The existence of the image in the public domain had thus been authorized by Emmett Till’s mother as part of her campaign against the racism that killed her child. Dana Schutz took on this image as a motif for a painting in 2017 in the light of its contemporary resonance. The artist was conscious of the complex political and ethical issues involved in her using this image in the context of American race politics and she has been powerfully critiqued for so doing. Indeed, some have called for her painting to be destroyed. It is not the place to argue this case. I raise it here because it precisely demonstrates the way in which photographs that expose the dead in that extreme vulnerability are overdetermined by the larger political and what I would call also mythical dimensions of ‘showing’, seeing, and in some ways ‘using’ a person’s body and image when they have no agency. Thus, the fact that Emmett Till’s family released the photograph changes its status in the public domain. But the question I shall address relates to the decision of any painter to claim such an image for her or his work. In doing so, the terms have changed and the questions of ethical responsibility and political effect are to be addressed to the painter and to the question of how the painting in its rematerialization of the historic photograph solicits its viewers in relation to the unguarded intimacy to which the painting submits the dead person as a corpse. For one response to Dana Schutz, see Calvin Tompkins’ article http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/why-dana-schutz-painted-emmett-till accessed 19 June 2017.

2. This hunch was contested by an art historian colleague, Eva Frojmovic who then found for me some examples in medieval Bohemian Christian art of the use of a gold field for an icon of the Virgin Mary. I am most grateful for both the questioning and the revealed source.

3. Kristeva was not concerned, however, with the art historical complexity of the theological, and resulting iconoclastic, shifts during the 1520s taking place in Basel when Hans Holbein the Younger was painting. For instance, art historians have been able to determine neither what this long and narrow painting was – a predella for an altarpiece or a cover for a tomb – nor precisely where Holbein himself stood on the matter of Reformation theology and its assaults on images as idolatry which culminated in a campaign of smashing sculptures in Basel’s churches in 1528 (Bätschmann and Griener 1997; Müller et al. 2006).