Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust

Abstract

This essay examines an aesthetics of disgust through an analysis of the work of Scottish painter Jenny Saville. Saville's paintings suggest that there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust. 1 contrast Saville's representations of disgust to the repudiation of disgust that characterizes contemporary corporeal politics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn andJulia Kristeva, I suggest that an aesthetics of disgust reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to critically attend to the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. The contemplation of beauty and pleasure are deeply embedded in the Western tradition of aesthetics. Despite their marginal position within this tradition, many women artists have continued with the practice of contemplating beauty and pleasure and their multiple and contested meanings. Scottish painter Jenny Saville (b. 1970) falls squarely within this tradition. Her work interrogates assumptions about beauty by depicting bodies that are not at all beautiful in any conventional sense. The bodies she depicts are not the refined and evenly proportioned nudes of classical art. Saville's enormous canvases, Plan and Hybrid, included in the 1997 show of young British artists, Sensation, depict distorted, fleshy, and disquieting naked female bodies. As with most of the work displayed in Sensation, Saville's paintings are sensational in both senses of the word: not only do they provoke the excitement and interest of the artworld, they also elicit sensual-even visceral-reactions. These bodies are rendered by way of surprising combinations of color. A mottled arrangement of mauves, yellows, browns, and blues seem to seep out from underneath the surface of the flesh. The unexpected use of color and fine brushstrokes compel Hypatia vol. 18, no. 4 (Fall/Winter 2003) 0 by Michelle Meagher

‘You don’t like this blood? Well, too bad!’ Alternative cultures of menstruation and the performativity of disgust

“…Another way of looking at disgust is Michelle Meagher's (2003) proposal that disgust is an affect that causes us to confront our own corporal experience, which is ambiguous and contradictory. Meagher (2003) examines how the work of Jenny Saville (who creates giant paintings of naked women whose bodies deviate from the hegemonic beauty canon) tackles the act of someone experiencing her own body as disgusting and also communicates the cultural components of disgust by locating them in social and cultural frameworks.…”

Closer. Fatness, desire, and seeing as touching

“…"As a gut reaction, disgust is an attempt to render oneself distinct from that which disgustsdisgust is that embodied practice of cringing, backing away, highlighting one's separation from an object" (Meagher 2003, 33). Analyzing critics' reactions to artist Jenny Saville's paintings of fat women, Michelle Meagher (2003) suggests that "there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust" (23). Reactions like disgust -spontaneous sensations triggered by something outside of us, but felt in the body, viscerally -are commonly interpreted as jolts of embodied knowledge, telling us what's good for us and what isn't.…”

“…In truth, Meagher argues, these feelings are often just expressions of an internalized "system of cultural ideas" (2003,25). Meagher (2003) further points out that the impulse to distance oneself that disgust causes is triggered by feelings of subjectivity itself being under threat: Subjects affirm their singularity and independence by aggressively establishing and patrolling boundaries between self and other, subject and object, the "me" and the "not me." (...) Kristeva's theory of abjection points out that such boundaries are fundamentally insecure.…”

Precarity, hybridity and vacillating identity: The work of Michel de M'Uzan and Jenny Saville on being human in a body

“…Much has been written about disturbance and the disquieting effect of Saville's work (e.g., Meagher, 2003;Maioli, 2010). Just as M'Uzan's paradoxical system conjoins the unconscious of both analyst and analysand, bringing contents of one mind into the other, so does Saville's odd perspective, disproportionality and unsettling features such as stretch marks in the flesh conjure up "every woman's worst nightmare" and evoke in the viewer questions about why big bodies are hard to look at (Meagher, 2003). One might criticize this on two counts: first, as a narrow feminist view and second, that it speaks of a gaze which is uniquely European and white.…”

“…They draw the viewer closer to take a better look, yet also force the viewer back in order to take in the huge landscape of the body or bodies she depicts. The viewer is immersed in “a landscape of fleshy formlessness” (Sotheby's, 2019), and this may prove to be a challenging experience as it inevitably draws her into an awareness of her own body and its impact on her own notions of “I.” Much has been written about disturbance and the disquieting effect of Saville's work (e.g., Meagher, 2003; Maioli, 2010). Just as M'Uzan's paradoxical system conjoins the unconscious of both analyst and analysand, bringing contents of one mind into the other, so does Saville's odd perspective, disproportionality and unsettling features such as stretch marks in the flesh conjure up “every woman's worst nightmare” and evoke in the viewer questions about why big bodies are hard to look at (Meagher, 2003).…”