Still Pending: Thought and Action as Feminist Aesthetics

by Susannah Magers

”My photography has always provided me with an opportunity to open myself up and see the world around me. And most of all, photography makes me look within.”

–Laura Aguilar

During a studio visit some years ago in Long Beach, I stared into a canvas jostling with lush, viscerally-rendered flesh and limbs. Though identifiable as such, this was a different sort of portrait––a gestural amalgam of tangled thighs and arms perched atop a stool, in which the subject, let alone gender, wasn’t knowable. The artist, Virginia Broersma, a painter, worked with the human figure in a deliberately fluid, abstracted manner, so as to disrupt the subconscious processes our eyes, and minds, default to performing when we look at the body: define, judge, and categorize. For her, obscured visual cues function as a device to reclaim agency through controlled, and intentional, representation.

Even in self-representation, can we ever escape immediate critical analysis, not to mention the patriarchal gaze, when viewing an image of the body? How does representation engender agency and do we have the power to grant this to ourselves? For Laura Aguilar, the late Mexican-American photographer known for her pioneering, unassuming nude self-portraiture and for capturing the marginalized communities of working class Latina lesbians in 1980s Southern California, this proved to be a central question continuously raised in her work. Where words weren’t accessible (Aguilar experienced auditory dyslexia, making verbal communication challenging) Aguilar’s self-portraits in nature in particular register a contemplative yet deeply raw vulnerability as strength. Long before today’s body positivity movement, Aguilar created a visual lexicon that celebrated her own and others’ bodies, in all shapes and sizes. 

As subject and creator, Aguilar has described her work as a collaboration, one between herself and the individuals within the communities she was a part of. Applying a similar, subject-driven methodology, Melissa Borman’s portrait series A Piece of Dust in the Great Sea of Matter negotiates the historical tropes of passive representation of women within the natural world. Injured several years ago while playing roller derby, Borman found herself bed-ridden and in recuperation for an extensive time period. Researching images of the human figure in the landscape, and reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, she was struck by Plath’s lucid declarations of feeling confined paired with the aforementioned one-dimensional, traditional representation of women in nature. 

What does it mean to be in your body? Together with members of her community, fellow artists, colleagues, and former teammates as subjects, Borman created unconventional portraits that depict subject-initiated interactions with the natural world: throwing rocks, grasping branches, swimming underwater, holding apples, hands tracing along the rock walls of a cave. Notably, Borman’s portraits are of women and gender non-conforming people—the latter having been virtually left out of the historical canon of landscape portraiture altogether. The subjects face the camera and face away, but the emphasis is on the physicality of these activities, the action, here. Hair entangled within the branches of a tree, wading in a stream, resting against the exposed and upturned roots of a riverbank tree, gazing upwards through leaf-dappled sunlight, or laying in a field of tall grass––this is certainly less confinement than a chosen stillness found by and embodied by these subjects. 

Looking at these bodies in these states of relative contentment, it’s easier to imagine that, like Aguilar, we too can take up the space we desire, the space we need, and the space we deserve. Unencumbered by society’s imposed constraints, these portraits ask what agency might be possible in our own lives. What does it mean to be seen? Who do we want to be seen by? Do we blend in because we want to or because we have to? 

Many of Borman’s portraits fragment the viewer’s gaze via visual layers such as trees, branches, and water that breaks up the reading of the figure. Borman’s portraits propose a reality in which the right of the marginalized body to simply exist without threat of violence is, if temporally, unchallenged. Violence is not exerted, is not an inevitability, and is not a threat. In these environments, these subjects don’t have to negotiate agency. These encounters are full of what curator Andrea Giunta describes as ‘liberating knowledge,’ or the experience of discovering agency.

“Photographing them is a form of demonstrating how much I value them. There is something about this collaborative process that felt as if they gave themselves permission to say, ‘I’m worthy of being photographed.”

–Melissa Borman

In this context, Borman is building an archive or repository for images of agency with these portraits. As anti-choice fervor spawns devastating legislative actions that are once again seeking to reduce reproductive freedoms across the country, this work encourages active intersectionality, and implores us to investigate and champion our own visibility with attention to and in support of others.  

“Feminist aesthetic politics refers to artists or artivists engaged in any strain of feminism whose creations or actions entail the production of politically and socially committed art in which feminism is understood as a form of thought and action.” 

–Julia Antivilo Peña

Interpreted through this lens, a feminist aesthetic––and by extension, I would argue, a feminist artistic practice––lies at the intersection of thought and action. A feminist aesthetic is informed by, and imbued with, an agenda––one that, according to Andrea Giunta, is “still pending.” In other words, this work is never over, but we are always already engaged in these activities as feminist cultural producers. 

Returning to Plath's text, the excerpts provide a narrative framework through which to experience these portraits, sequenced by Borman in the same way her photographs are. Each textual fragment is a distinct moment carefully extracted from the whole, paired with the portraits and reconstructed to form a new record, or testimony, of this liberated time and space––one free of hierarchies and tokenized representation. 

This concept coalesces in the text fragment on page 58: ‘Suddenly, there is a taste of wisdom.’ Paired with Borman’s portraits, Plath’s ‘wisdom’ takes on a new depth: this wisdom isn’t learned or given, but inherent, if latent, within all of us. Just as Aguilar’s self-portraits serve as powerful reminders that we need not look outside, compare, wait to be validated, or succumb to anything less than total self-determination, this selection of Plath’s text by Borman is a reminder to trust, and invest, completely and unapologetically, in ourselves. 

Interpreted this way, the figures in the landscape operate as the “dust” in Plath’s words, with the portraits in the series together comprising the “great sea of matter.” Dust is rich with symbolic meaning; the notion of dust can conjure spaces that range from the more limited domestic sphere to the vastness of the cosmos. Dust is transient matter, but can also collect and remain stagnant, shaped by and reacting to outside forces. The inverted photographs of unsettled dust particles––a third interstitial element interspersed between the portraits and text––connect Plath’s text with the images of women in the landscape, suggesting not only a symbolic but metaphysical relationship between shifting manifestations of identity and self-embodiment, while considering how these ideas are transmuted within ourselves and to others.

1A reference to an idea articulated by Andrea Giunta in her essay, “The Iconographic Turn,” specifically this excerpt on page 33: “This new knowledge had an emancipatory effect on viewers and on artists, bearers––since the decades encompassed by the exhibition of knowledge that allowed to grasp the complexity of their affects and of their bodies.” From the exhibition catalog, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, edited by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta; Hammer Museum, 2017.

2Excerpted from the essay, “Feminist Art and ‘Artivism’ in Latin America: A Dialogue in Three Voices,” by Julia Antivilo Peña, Mónica Mayer, and María Laura Rosa; page 38. From the exhibition catalog, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, edited by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta; Hammer Museum, 2017.

3Excerpted from a footnote on page 35 from the aforementioned essay by Andrea Giunta, “The Iconographic Turn,”: ‘Liberating the body from stereotypes contributed to the legal, political, professional, social, familial, and personal equality that women had been denied and that the feminist agenda has pursued starting with its first incarnations in the nineteenth century and through more recent and contemporary versions. Much of the feminist agenda is still pending.’ From the exhibition catalog, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, edited by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta; Hammer Museum, 2017.