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“And for de Laretis the solution lies not in invoking the experiences of actual women, for within the prevailing discourses we can know nothing about these, but rather, in illustrating over and over again, in various ways and at various levels, the lack of identity between women and ‘Woman’.”[i]

Plato envisaged the existence of another world comprised of Forms or Ideas, of which our world is a defective copy. An ideal image represents consummate perfection and stands as a constant reminder of the unachievable. If that were all there was to it, it would be an easy matter to explain away Ideal Woman (a non-existent object) by dismissing it as a mere fiction with no more impact on our lives than any other chimera. But there would appear to be something of an ideal woman abroad, an idea written with a lower case ‘i’ (the idea of woman, or “Woman”) which has been constructed here in our world and not so easily disposed of.

Over the past three years my artistic work has been centred on a persona I have chosen to call Peggy-Sue. To some extent she represents my figuration of an unsuccessful attempt at self-alignment with an ideal. The emphasis in the work has shifted between very personal stances and an artistic ethics. My aim has been to arrive at an understanding of the questions that I perceive Peggy-Sue as posing (while beset by doubts and yet intent upon getting at their meaning) through exploring the models and theories that bear on the questions that confront me, both as an artist and as a private individual.

“As against ‘Woman’ as set up within analytical feminism – with the quotation marks serving to point up its constructed non-referential character, and the capitalized initial its universalising aspect – de Lauretis refers to women in the plural, using a lower case w and no quotation marks: women in the real world. Not, as did the ideology-critiquing feminism of the 70s, to make comparisons between them, but to point up the interaction between real life and its definition that remains a constant. And where we, caught up as we are in life as lived, will never be able to grasp its definitional counterpart in the hegemonic patriarchal discourse where – and this is the important point – the feminine is what is excluded.”[ii]

A pre-eminent Dream Factory product is Marilyn Monroe. The icon she became is more potent than any description of her. Marilyn Monroe was a bimbo, an actress, a woman, an American, an icon, an idol, a star, a victim, a riddle, a model, a suicide, a product. Enigmatic, hysterical, gorgeous, diffident, diffident, charismatic, sexy, vulgar, a drug addict, misunderstood, tender, plump, blonde, innocent, seductive, talented, depressive, an alcoholic, religious, married, promiscuous…and so one could continue. An unending stream of epithets, often mutually contradictory and bearing an array of connotations designed to unravel the mystery created by the icon. But they serve only to contribute to the incoherence and paradox that gets read into Marilyn Monroe qua image.

“En effet, à côté de la prétention de tout individu à s’affirmer comme sujet, qui est une prétention éthique, il y a aussi en lui la tentation de fuir sa liberté et de se constituer en chose: c’est un chemin néfaste car passif, aliené, perdu, il est alors la proie de volontés étrangères, coupé de sa transcendance, frustré de toute valeur. Mais c’est un chemin facile: on évite ainsi l’angoisse et la tension de l’existence authentiquement assumée.”[iii]

Marilyn Monroe isn’t simply a product of Hollywood in the sense that it was there that her career was made: she is also seen as both formed and fostered by the films that Hollywood produced. The daughter of a film company employee, she was often in the position of having the cinema as a babysitter. In the novel Blonde[iv], Monroe’s trauma is portrayed as constituted by the absence of her mother, with cinematic experience figuring as a substitute. According to the cultural theorist Lisbet van Zoonen, the filmic experience invests the spectator with a feeling of omnipotence set off by the interplay between identification with the perfect character on screen (the mirror stage) and a sense of union with the mother at the pre-mirror stage, wrought by the cinematic experience’s mediation of the suspension of time, place and self.[v]

Mystery engenders myth. The silence of the subject rendered Marilyn Monroe immortal. Norma Jean was the victim of her silence, and on that point I join with many others in drawing a connection between her passivity (an assumption I believe to be grounded) and her psychological background in order to show that the subject needs to take her own self-elected place if she’s not to be reduced to a passive object. Now to this it might be objected that Marilyn Monroe actively situated herself qua object. But, seeing Marilyn Monroe’s suicide as precisely a reaction to her sense of disconnect from the cliché in terms of which she was perceived, I would construe her so situating herself in terms of the temptation of which Simone de Beauvoir speaks in the passage quoted above.

Dolly Parton is also a blonde. Or is she? For the sake of clarity I’ll split the name Dolly Parton into Dolly – the prominent media persona – and Parton, the producer and creator of Dolly. Parton makes use of Dolly as a ploy to win popularity: Dolly is a masquerade designed to grab attention. But on what is our attention supposed to be funnelled? My first impression of Dolly Parton was one of saccharinity and tweeness. This was chiefly the result of the immediate visual impression. A more probing exploration of her artistry left me stunned by the sheer professionalism with which she conducts her career and the scope of her production. For all my feminism, it was impossible for me to graft together the impression of Dolly as decorative and “feminine” and the idea of Parton’s production as careerist and “male”. The Dolly Parton phenomenon set off questions in me that exposed my prejudices about the significance of gender.

I cannot help but wonder whether it isn’t in fact the intention that the viewer should first be fascinated by Dolly in order, subsequently, to recognize the power of Parton as an artist. Does this doubleness not parallel the syndrome described by the psychoanalyst Joan Rivière[vi] in respect of female transvestism, where the female masquerade serves to conceal the maleness (brilliance) within? Is that how Parton placates the showbiz empire (man) to avoid exclusion (reprisals) as a competitor (the threat of castration)?

As artist, Peggy-Sue is strongly influenced by Dolly Parton and her repertoire. But Peggy-Sue relies simply on her appearance and charisma and remains blithely insouciant about her untrained voice.

This is how I felt after one performance and I don’t know whether it was myself or Peggy-Sue who wrote this:

There were several occasions when, meeting my audience, I felt as though I were a man in women’s clothes. And it was accepted. Until I began to sing with a brittle female vocalist’s voice and then the bubble burst. Then it was as if I were a traitor.For I wasn’t a real man – not a candidate for a friendly (or horror-stricken homophobic) thump on the back. It seemed to call for an extra bit of hip swinging. Since, qua traitor, I was recognizable as a sister to a global sisterhood, that meant that order was restored – the hierarchy reinstated. This experience is not the norm. It is a matter of nanoseconds. I can’t say whether it was the man in the leather waistcoat or the lady with the shining hair whose gaze faltered a bit or who hesitated. There were other occasions when it was as though it wasn’t me they were talking to. I had to translate their language. I recognized it as something resembling TV talk. They spoke to me and not with me. I understand them – I wasn’t really visible. They didn’t know whom they were talking to. The men. I’d pulled it off. For I knew whom I was talking to. They were not talking from behind a disguise or under threat. Or so they thought. Although they continued to look slightly unsure of themselves and were mildly threatening. Would not take No for an answer. Or perhaps they were listening to my laughter, so I stopped laughing. Obviously, I’m not talking about all men. I’m thinking of three guys in Copenhagen, late one night and they were drunk.

What Parton holds out on is the extent to which Dolly is a mask and who Parton is. Whether, in actual fact, Parton is the person figured forth by Dolly, or not. By thus keeping the audience guessing, Parton controls and creates the myth and icon of Dolly Parton.

There’s sometimes a touch of ambiguity attaching to the use of masquerades. They have a variety of functions and may be analysed in both psychoanalytical and sociological terms. Equally, they are describable both from the viewer’s perspective and from that of the subject adopting the disguise. Given that “masking” is generally used when there is something needing to be masked it may be assumed that what is masked must be concealed from view. This may apply in the case of biological gender, cultural and social status. There is, moreover, a subtler, more passive species of masking where the subject conceals, say, his or her motives or intentions.

The art historian Rosalind Krauss[vii] discusses the notion of masquerade from the perspective of the male gaze and touches upon concepts such as fetish, internal, external, the ideal contra the material. She traces the concepts back to the essentialism of which she is critical when talking about the human subject. She explains this stance by reference to Lacan’s theory to the effect that the human subject is not his or her own person but organized by other forces – Lacan’s “the Other” – and is preoccupied with the unconscious, language, social laws. At the same time, the subject is in possession of an ego, the sense of an autonomous self, “the person I really am”. The ego configures itself vis-à-vis the image of a cohesive reality, of a unitary figure or persona that it has seen in a mirror. Throughout its existence, the ego will persist in identifying exemplars of unity. One example of this, Rosalind Krauss claims, is the woman as fetish, “pas-tout” – not whole. Thus it is the promptings of the ego that create the need for essences and truths, unities – the urge to expose, to peer behind the mask, the belief in something behind the mask, something authentic.

For a period, I was very interested in acting and tried out different modes of character portrayal. I distinguished three distinct approaches to the actor’s ego in the working process.

The first approach is exemplified by the methods that let the actor interpret the scenes by drawing on subjective experience. This method is predicated on mythological meanings and the importance of archetypes, coupled with the idea of the collective unconscious. In consequence, the working process is marked by the search for inner points of reference to distinctive character traits. On my reading of it, the actor’s ego is invested with a sense of human universality and his or her function is to bring out these aspects of the ego.

A second stance is discernible within a so-called classical portrayal of character. The challenge to the actor is to construct the character in light of the context from which the character draws his or her profile, viz. the play and its import. The working process consists in a theoretical analysis of the text and an attempt to make consummate use of the instrument that is the character’s vehicle, i.e. the actor’s body. Accommodation of the actor’s ego is confined to contingent overlaps between the subject’s experiences and the narrative thread pursued by the stage character.

The third stance on character portrayal is what I would call “the neutral mask”. Since in this case it is the method that creates the character, I shall describe it in detail.

The actor dons a white mask and looks at his or her reflection in a mirror: it is the narrative prompted by that reflection that is to be acted out through improvisation. In some cases there is an outsider who prompts “the neutral mask” either by proposing an action or by holding up the mirror as a reminder of the narrative. The “neutral mask” is in this case a white “total” mask bereft of “speaking” as an option, and sometimes without “understanding” of verbal language. The optimal, calculated, effect in experiencing the mirror image as a neuter is the inducement of a state of shock intended to send the subject into a trance – oblivious of time and place, language and context. The objective seems to be to break down the subject’s ego in the quest for something arguably comparable to (Lacan’s) “the Other”.[viii] However, the basic elements in the model (mask, mirror, improvisation) are also put in the service of less extreme ends, with the mask not presenting neutrality and not figuring as mute. Here I construe the contemplation of the mirror image as a symbolic act that dissolves the subject’s self-image.

The film theorist Mary Ann Doane poses the question: “What might it mean to masquerade as [female] spectator? To assume the mask in order to see in a different way?”[ix] In the discourse about the woman as masked, the division between the gazers and those gazed at, between the male gaze and woman as object, is normative. It builds on the Freudian view that the woman is denied access to the experience of seeing herself as a woman since she is unable to draw a physiological, gender distinction between her own sex and her mother’s. Since the fear of castration does not obtain, there’s no way of creating the necessary distance and thereby the capacity for self-perception and self-definition. The capacity for self-reflection and distance thus becomes a male prerogative. To bring about the possibility of creating this distance the woman identifies herself as a man. Thus does she become both a seer and the one seen. Which again may be construed as a form of transvestism. Joan Rivière writes that “womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it”.[x] The masquerade of womanliness is a reaction formation against the woman’s trans-sex identification, her transvestism. The masquerade mediates a lacuna in the form of a determinate distance between oneself and one’s image.

To return to Mary Ann Doane’s question about what it might involve to masquerade as a woman viewer, the above discussion suggests that the possibility of masquerading involves the assumption of a masculine posture qua woman. Just as Doane’s follow-up question may be answered by saying that the different way of seeing is already an option. And yet, is it apt to begin with an external adaptation in order to establish distance and an alternative perspective on oneself and the context in which one’s life is set? That question triggered the crystallization of Peggy-Sue in my imagination.

It was never my intention to apply a Peggy-Sue mask. Using the “neutral mask” method I was experimenting with the question of the sustainability of an alternative self-image. If it is sustainable, then to what extent, and what figures as my mirror? Peggy-Sue, qua mask, may best be compared to an attempt to create a counter-image of self, an alternative to my own ego.

My mask matches the patriarchal image of the other, the woman. In line with the iconography of which she is a part, I pick up on her foremost attribute, the name Peggy-Sue. The name is crucial. It is a portal that opens up for an associative tapestry, rich in such detail, stories and images as might include pink, the 50s, the USA, white trash, waitress, wannabee, nom de guerre, minor character. Now I have just reeled off these associations, but once the spotlight is trained on the work, Peggy-Sue no longer figures as a minor character. By borrowing from me she becomes a social being, participant in the process, the experience, through which subjectivity is created. Qua protagonist she is defined against the backdrop of her history and her premises qua subject. I want to highlight the fact that Peggy-Sue is out there; she exists. Not as a positive femininity (the principle of essentialism) but as existent in language, in the imagination, while what she represents, albeit in its most abstract form, remains in its silence, a myth, a universal truth.

Rosalind Krauss writes: “So what is myth? Myth is depoliticized speech. Myth is ideology. Myth is the act of draining history out of signs and reconstructing these signs instead as ‘instances’, in particular, instances of universal truths or of natural law, of things that have no history, no specific embeddedness, no territory of contestation. Myth steals into the heart of the sign to convert the historical into the ‘natural’– something that is uncontested, that is simply ‘the way things are’.”[xi]

I query the universality of the ideal on a practical plane – by giving Peggy-Sue a specific and alternative narrative that she acts out through her demeanour, her show and the stage where the show is performed: a caravan. In what she reveals, she illustrates the failure of a discreet and studied adaptation to her ideal of femininity.

Qua something external to me, referred to in the third person, Peggy-Sue figures as an autonomous character. My role as an artist confers on me the right to make decisions regarding what sets Peggy-Sue going: my body and thoughts. The work is less the putting on of a performance than it is the creation of a persona. And, qua work, of an object.

In my work as an artist, I have elected to address questions regarding the role of a subject, primarily that of a woman, and to do so through a persona. In her photographs, the artist Cindy Sherman presents a wide variety of pictures of women. I am not going to draw direct comparisons between our work, but in considering my own output reference to Sherman is hard to avoid.

The question prompts itself as to why Cindy Sherman is never tempted to offer a theoretical legitimation of her work, through which she might direct the viewer. However, I see her reticence not as betokening passivity but as an active gesturing towards the discussion conducted by critics and the media. As an artist, Sherman distinguishes herself from Dolly Parton by the unequivocal directness of her relation to her material, her work, but she draws upon a similar species of mystification to catch and hold attention. And I see that as a ploy aimed at bringing out the most acute sensitivities of the material.

Sherman’s reluctance to pronounce on her art has resulted in critics being the more assiduous in re-addressing it, interpreting it and analysing it afresh, in new contexts, from different angles. In brief, as motivated by their own interests.

Over the full twenty years spanned by Cindy Sherman’s production the debate about women’s roles in representation has changed radically. Film theorist Laura Mulvey has described this shift: “The initial idea that images contributed to women’s alienation from their bodies and from their sexuality, with an attendant hope of liberation and recuperation, give way to theories of representation as symptom and signifier of the way problems posed by sexual difference under patriarchy could be displayed onto the feminine”.[xii] This shift has influenced the way in which Sherman’s work has been interpreted from a feminist perspective. From initially criticizing Sherman for merely contributing to the flow of (negative) images that occlude women’s rights to self-representation, feminist critics now applaud her work for bringing out important aspects of women as masked.

A sharpened focus on her working methods has led to Sherman’s photographs coming to exemplify postmodern currents in the art world. As critic Douglas Crimp writes in spring 1979:

”We would not take these pictures for anything but staged. Like ordinary snapshots, they appear to be fragments; unlike those snapshots, their fragmentation is not of a natural continuum, but of a syntagmatic sequence, that is, of a conventional, segmented temporality. They are like quotations from the sequence of frames that constitute the narrative flow of film. Their sense of narrative is one of its simultaneous presence and absence, a narrative ambience stated but not fulfilled.”[xiii]

Rosalind Krauss and Laura Mulvey point to Sherman’s method of positioning herself both in front of the camera, in view, and behind it, viewing, as constitutive of a commentary on the male gaze.

Once she’d established herself internationally, the common perception of Sherman’s pictures was that they were primarily autobiographical, either forming a series of self-portraits describing an endless restlessness and search for the subject’s essence or, taken together, as forming an oeuvre to be read as a self-portrait where the diversity of personae suggests a complicated many-faceted personality. Abigail Solomon Godeau couples Sherman’s international breakthrough with the need to construe the role of the artist as one concerning and addressing “a common cultural sensibility”.[xiv] Krauss thinks that the need stems from the urge to consume the myth and the myth in this case is that of the artist imitating reality as seen through the lens of her sensibility.[xv]

From a philosophical perspective, I remain somewhat sceptical about Krauss’s critique of the myth of the artist. Granted, it’s not the aim of the artist to imitate reality, but when it comes to artistic method I find myself wondering whether it’s at all possible quite to avoid an element of imitation. For doesn’t living one’s life involve some measure of imitation for everyone? (The very thought of reality and consciousness leads me to cup my chin in my hand and stare vacantly out of the window.)

Peggy-Sue’s existence continues to be perpetuated through me despite my having known periods where I’ve vowed to have no further truck with her. The issues concerning women and identity that Peggy-Sue represents retain their urgency for me, for all that some aspects of them are now regarded as hackneyed. Given the originality constraint to which artists are subject, I resist engaging with issues perceived as already well worked through. But in the context of the development of Peggy-Sue I’m prepared to flout that constraint – convinced that that the subtlety the material has to offer will repay further engagement.

[i]Lisbeth Larsson (ed.), Feminismer, (Lund: Studentlitteratur 1996), p.10.

[ii]Ibid, p.9.

[iii] Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe 1 (Paris: Gallimard 1949/1976) p. 21

[iv]The novelist bases her character on Marilyn Monroe but does not claim to have penned a biography. Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde, (London: Fourth Estate 2000)

[v] Van Zoonen draws here on Laura Mulvey’s theories.

Lisbet van Zoonen, Feminist Media Studies, (London: Sage 1994), p.89.

[vi]Joan Rivière, "Womanliness as a Masquerade", first published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10, (1929).

[vii]Rosalind Krauss, “Cindy Sherman: Untitled”, Bachelors, (London: October 1999)

[viii]One of Jacques Lacan’s key concepts is to be found in “ Le stade de miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je” (a lecture delivered at the International Congress for Psychoanalysis in Zurich, 17 July 1949), Écrits, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1966)

[ix]Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator”, Screen, (September/October 1982), vol. 23, nr 3-4, p. 82.

[x]Rivière, "Womanliness as a Masquerade" cited in Doane 1982 (see preceding note) p. 81.

[xi]Krauss, “Cindy Sherman: Untitled”, Bachelors, s.105.

[xii] Laura Mulvey, “ A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman”, New Left Review 188 (July/August 1991), p.137.

[xiii]Douglas Crimp, “Pictures”, first published in October, no. 8, (spring 1979), Art after Modernism: rethinking representation, (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art 1995), p.181.

[xiv]Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Suitable for Framing: The Critical Recasting of Cindy Sherman”, Parkett, nr 29 (1991)

[xv]Krauss, “Cindy Sherman: Untitled”, Bachelors, p.106.