Between the Joy of the Woman Castrator and the Silence of the

Woman Victim: Following the Exhibition The Uncanny XX

Sigal Barkai

Abstract

The chapter describes the coping of Israeli female artists with a special type of ‘Uncanny‘,

defined here as the ‘Feminine Uncanny’. Following an exhibition curated by the author in a

Tel Aviv gallery in 2012, she analyses the different representations of that notion, as it were

manifested in the exhibited artworks. Freudian and Lacanian perceptions of the phallus,

masculinity, castration anxiety and femininity underwent a reversal in meaning, so they could

reflect the being of women in general and of Israeli women in particular. The analysis points

out three different ways to address the fear of masculine violence: defiance, grotesque

exaggeration and Silence.

One of the most intriguing and stimulating psychoanalytical concepts, “the Uncanny”,

was formulated by Sigmund Freud1 in his article of that name. Freud defined the

uncanny as “belonging to all that is terrible - to all that arouses dread and creeping

horror”.2 Amongst the complex of creeping and frightening things, Freud distinguishes a

certain quality of the uncanny: “That class of the terrifying which leads back to

something long known to us, once very familiar”. (ibid) In German, the word

Unheimlich means 'domestic' in a negative sense: the unfamiliar, the non-homey. This is

a contradictory term, however, articulating the unfamiliar and the familiar, the known

and the unknown, hidden and mysterious. Freud concludes that there is a hidden threat

deeply rooted inside the apparently safe and known.

Women, in particular, are subject to the perilous nature of the uncanny, the unsafe,

the unstable, the horrifying. Jacques Lacan3 elaborates Freud's theory and claims that a

woman, who has no penis to identify with, takes part in the social order only as non-

man. The woman does not voice herself but only exists as opposite of man. Both the girl

and the boy need to compensate their mother for her lack of a penis by “becoming a

phallus” i.e., identifying themselves with the social order and norms represented by the

name of the father (75-98). However, many feminist thinkers confronted Lacan. In her

book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir4, for example, argues that “one is not born a

woman, but becomes one”; namely, it is the social construction of women as the

quintessential ‘Other’ of Man that is fundamental to women's oppression.

In her book The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf5 contends that the modern ‘liberated’

woman is, in fact, vulnerable and exhausted from within due to a constant need to

protect herself from potential assault. The successful working woman, more than her

counterpart the housewife, is at risk of home violence, while also exposed to potential

sexual harassment in her work place and the possibility of confronting ‘invisible

attackers’. Further, millions of women around the world are being abused and even

raped by their husbands or partners every year. Under these circumstances, women

develop fantasies of protection.6

The feminist poet and philosopher Hélène Cixous, in her ground-breaking essay

“The Laugh of the Medusa”7, challenged Freud and Lacan by addressing Freud's essay

“The Head of the Medusa”8. According to Freud, the severed head of Medusa in Greek

mythology is symbolic of castration anxiety. It is the moment when the child first lays

eyes on the feminine vagina. The child freezes with dread and horror. Freud's perceives

the Medusa's head as a threatening female sexual organ surrounded by undulating

snakes/penises. Cixous criticizes this perception: “Woman will return to the body which

has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny

stranger on display – the ailing or dead figure;” and she adds, “Which so often turns out

to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions.”9

Cixous responded to the notion of the vagina as uncanny by encouraging women

to write their own subjectivity and identity; to write (or create artistically) the beautiful

and the poetic in the female corporeal experience, and not to be subordinated to the

misogynist definitions of the woman's body: “I write woman,” she explains, “woman

must write woman. And man, man.” (4) Whereas the Phallic Eye is conventionally

regarded as a masculine ‘scientific’ way of defining women through knowledge (the

kind of knowledge established within the patriarchal framework), I prefer a feminist

perspective of a feminine uncanny, addressing the “dread and creeping horror” back to

masculinity and its perilous pleasures and horrors.

I initiated the exhibition The Uncanny XX at a Tel Aviv gallery in February

2012.10 The exhibition sought to represent the psychological and social implications of

this particular type of ‘uncanny’, the feminine uncanny. The name of the exhibition was

derived from the biological definition of female genetics by the chromosome XX. The

home environment proved to be fertile for extracting memories and experiences of

women, who summoned the home space into their artistic work. The re-imagined home

scene in this exhibition was constituted from the uncanny felt by women. The Uncanny

XX problematized both body and soul: the desecration of the female body on the one

hand, and the dismantling of her fragile mental trust, on the other.

As a curator and scholar of young, contemporary Israeli art, I was inspired by

Freud's article to look for artworks that reflect the sexual anxieties of Israeli women

artists. Many women artists I talked to attested to a certain sexual anxiety and threat

seeping into their work, even if they had not personally experienced any abuse. Further,

the exhibition space interrelated with a sort of male entity. The artists corresponded,

provoked, subverted, confronted or tried to please this abstract male entity. At the same

time, they sought to formulate a private and personal statement about sexuality,

femininity and identification as young female artists in Israel.

At first, I had considered the feminine uncanny as an archaic concept, manifesting

women's solidarity against the threatening male power throughout history. Later I

identified more specific attributes of the Israeli culture reflected in the exhibited

artworks. The works corresponded to the state of being-a-woman, or, more precisely,

being an Israeli woman, in the second decade of the 21st century. This chapter thus deals

with interpretations of the universal feminine psyche, as well as with more particular,

local ideas arising from the Israeli culture itself.

The exhibition was created in a two year process of joint thinking and working,

carried out with a group of young artists involved in the collective, non-profit Hanina

Gallery. The gallery is located on the border between the ‘white’, prosperous area of the

city of Tel Aviv and the neglected, socially challenged ‘no-man's land’ of south Tel

Aviv. A significant area of the latter is home to illegal immigrants and refugees from

Sudan and other African countries. The members of the gallery are artists and art

educators who contribute to this liminal environment by showing art and initiating

social and educational activities in their neighbourhood.

Hanina Gallery

A meeting at Hanina Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2011

The meetings with the artists took place at the gallery every few weeks. They included a

series of talks and passionate debates, revealing artworks in process and reading texts

aloud. The idea of a common, archaic, feminine experience, marked by fear of the

phallus in society and in art, inspired the artists, who critically explored the social and

familial environments in which they live. The works were created amongst a dialogue

that provoked antagonism, identification, defiance and reflection, which eventually

yielded a series of new works.

A Castrating Warrior-Girl

Michelangelo, David, Marble, 1504

Vered Aharonovitch: First Blood, marble powder and polyester cast, 2012

(life size).

The centre of the gallery featured a life-size cast girl, wearing a leather belt with a huge

sword stuck in it. The look in her eyes is intent and troubled. One of her feet is raised

and her posture manifests vigilance and readiness for battle. The posture and the gaze

remind us of Michelangelo's David. Like the classic figure, the girl clutches a hand to

her shoulder, holding something. Differing from the slingshot of David, marking a

potential future conflict however, Aharonovitch's girl is already returning from the

battle with her loot. Descending from her shoulder is a long string of amputated

phalluses, crossing the gallery floor and on the staircase.

Freud's theorization of the uncanny clearly deals with the castration anxiety. The

incarnations of this anxiety are reflected in divided, reproductive and repetitive

formations of the self. This anxiety is regularly represented in multiple symbols of the

penis in dreams and reality. This particular sculpture realizes one of the deepest fears of

men. Further, the title of this work, First Blood, is drawn from the world of martial arts.

The one who cuts his opponent first is the one to ‘draw first blood’. The equivalent

statement among squabbling children is ‘You started it! You hit me first!’ This is a

moment of revenge and consequent violent injury. Likewise, the artist Aharonovitch

challenges the men's world: “We women are allowed to take revenge, because you have

hurt us first”. Although this work ostensibly adopts a virile language and masculine

norms of fighting, it actually subverts the militaristic male imperative. The chain of

amputated male organs descending from the child's shoulder represents women's

revenge for male assaults on women throughout history.

The artist intensified the gender-bending pattern by using the image of the girl to

replace the image of David. Aharonovitch thereby relates to popular cultural structures

in Israeli society. Eva Illouz and Eitan Wilf11 compare the social image of women in the

United States to the way femininity is perceived in Israel, and argue that the Israeli

woman is less identified with the home sphere. In Israel, the feminine sphere and self-

definition of women are tightly connected to hegemonic masculinity (220). The main

agency of this cultural code is the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force (223). Orna Sasson-

Levy12 suggests that many Israeli women respond to the powerful cultural influence of

the army by imitating and adopting male identification. Hence, it is no wonder that

Aharonovitch chose to express her feminist protest precisely by identifying and

imitating an iconic male figure. Moreover, the girl sculptured by Aharonovich is almost

androgynous and can easily be taken for a young boy. This androgyneity may also

symbolize an emotional identification with the role of the hero, the warrior and the

phallic.

A Space of Female Materiality

Keren Ella Geffen, The Blue Blower's Puff, 2012

Keren Ella Geffen's installation The Blue Blower's Puff was created only a week before

the opening of the exhibition. Hundreds of white balloons were inflated and tied with red

embroidery thread, then dipped in acrylic colours. The balloons were attached to the

wall and ceiling and to each other. The final form of the installation reflects a tension

between the artwork itself and the narrow, curved space of the gallery.

The repeated image in Geffen's work is that of a busty, round breast with a pink

nipple replicated and duplicated. The strings that dangle down from the ‘breasts’

simulate blood, milk or other body fluids. The bleeding, dripping, sensual and chaotic

object is responding to physical experiences familiar to almost every woman: loss of

control of body fluids during menstruation, after birth, during breastfeeding and with

aging. In the masculine mind, these phenomena make the woman abject, excluding and

channelling her to the domestic dark, damp, hidden sphere.13 Judith Butler, however, in

her Bodies That Matter14 rejects the link between the materiality and corporeality of

women. She claims that by using this physical explanatory, the patriarchal imagination

restricts women to a ‘vessel’.15 Butler particularly resists the ‘natural’ identification of

women with their productivity. She refers to the devious way in which the feminine

body has become a symbol of reduction and exclusion of women in culture (35). Geffen,

in contrast, celebrates the power of an excessive, superfluous, productive female body

and turns it into a spectacle of female force and domination.

The French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray16 also demands a language that will

represent the female body in a non-repressive way. Irigaray develops a feminine

language of smells, touch, heat and cold, texture, light and darkness (106). Such body

fantasy liberates women and encourages new patterns and an emergent of a different

kind of femininity.17 Correspondingly, Geffen's artwork develops a space of its own in a

spontaneous and irrational manner, unconstrained and not limited to phallogocentristic

thinking. She embraces the random, the liquid and the boundless as a site of power,

allowing a different sort of logic, one that dynamically responds to the constant changes

in space and time. The energy erupting from of the many balloons is politicized here.

This installation reflects the struggle for gender recognition and alternative

identifications.

The balloons are nonetheless soft, full of air and can be destroyed easily. These

‘aggressive breasts’ also manifest sensitivity and vulnerability. Unlike Aharonovitch's

rigid and ‘masculine’ radicalism, Geffen's work attacks and retreats at the same time.

She provokes and threatens the boundaries of the Other; and yet, her work implies

Vanitas, the destruction and dismantling of the womanly body from within.18 The breast

is shown as plentiful, smooth and flawless; but soon it will become faded, decayed and

aged.

Erhart, Gregor, Vanitas, c. 1500

Wood, height: 46 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna .

In Geffen's work, every balloon inflated by the breath of the blower reflects erotic

impulse and creative energy, manifested in the image of the full breast; and also

simulating the swelling of the penis during erection. Unlike Freud's theory that contrasts

the penis's fullness and bursting energy with the female organ's lack and passivity,

Geffen deliberately analogizes the penis and the breast. Both organs are perceived here

as vessels of temporary lust that swell during arousal, charged with impulses, drives and

desires; and then, after the sexual climax, both the penis and the breast gradually deflate

and diminish. Thus, the ethos of the artist as genius is reformulated here, having a

significantly vital and active role for artists of all genders. In this consolidation of gender

identity, art helps to transcend traditional barriers and archaic definitions of the

‘material’, particularly the ‘materiality’ of the female body.

Another issue discussed in Geffen's artwork is motherhood. The Jewish-Israeli

culture is particularly sensitive to the status of women as mothers. Art-historian Gideon

Ofrat analysed the status of the mother in Jewish-Zionist culture and concluded that “the

biological mother wasn't overtly praised in Israeli art, for she was subdued to the

collective strata. Indeed, between the 'Yiddishe Mama', the typical, diasporic Jewish

mother who is anxious and devoted to her child, the productive mother who is

subordinated to the national fertility, and the bereaved mother – not much space was left

for the earthy and individual figure of the biological mother”.19 Such nationalist,

collectivist portrayal of New Jewish Mothers is embodied, for example, in Yohanan

Simon's artwork Sabbath on the Kibbutz (Oil on canvas, 65x55cm, 1947).

Yohanan Simon, Sabbath on the Kibbutz, Oil on canvas, 65x55cm, 1947

In contrast, in 1997 Yehudit Matzkel and Hadara Scheflan-Katzav curated the exhibition

Oh, Mama! Representations of the Mother in Israeli Contemporary Art at the Museum

of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan. The exhibition presented a variety of maternal

representations but did not focus on collective, national or patriotic mothers, Mother

Earth or mythological mothers. Rather, it emphasized the works of mothers-artists that

concentrate on mother-child relations. This exhibition marked a significant development

in Israeli society in the 1990s. The critical feminist discourse had disseminated further in

society, resulting in women's daring to voice their own life experiences, and to reveal

their rich and vibrant inner world that had been kept hidden from the public eye for too

many years. Geffen, who grew up in this emancipated atmosphere, oscillates among

connotations of the breast as a nursing organ, an erotic zone, a site of anxiety or a

dominant and powerful organ; an organ that stimulates existential meditation or a

specific one that raises a suppressed, uncanny threat. The artist feels safe enough to

playfully charge the image with contrasted meanings, and to exaggerate it physically and

metaphorically until it becomes grotesque and humoristic.

Home as a Locus of Silence and Muteness

Yifat Giladi, Ha'Ogen 17, Video, 2012

Yifat Giladi's video Ha'Ogen 17 (meaning in Hebrew: “17 Anchor Street”, specifying an

Israeli home address) creates a different atmosphere in regard to gender schemes. It

promotes awareness of the oppression, victimization and submissiveness of women.

Giladi's work visualizes maternal silence as an inherent characteristic of mother-

daughter relations. Here, the daughter suspects that her mother had been sexually abused

in the past, but she fails to break her wall of silence. In this way, the mother latently

collaborates with the man who had abused her.

This video includes a static one-shot documentation of the artist's childhood house,

edited in a way that compresses a full cycle of day and night. This is an extreme long

shot taken from behind the bushes, apparently through the eyes of a stalker who is

planning to commit a crime. Alternatively, this might have been filmed through the eyes

of the daughter, who had not dared to come closer to the place where the violent event

had occurred. In a mismatch between image and sound, the voice-over reflects an

intimate conversation between mother and daughter, which supposedly takes place

inside the house. This ‘interview’ includes the daughter's piercing questions, which are

answered with the continuous silence of the mother (either being there or imagined).

The presence of the mother is represented by her absent voice. The questions are

politely and tentatively posed: “Does it bother you if I take a video? Can you tell me a

little?” As time goes by, and the silence persists, the questions become more demanding

and invasive: “Did it happen at home? What did you feel? How did he do it?” When this

strategy doesn't work either, the daughter/interviewer moves to cross-examination,

focusing on the details of the event: “Was he wearing something or was he naked? Did

he ask you to take off your shirt and pants when he did it?” The two last questions are

asked together, urgently and repeatedly, like an investigation operated under pressure.

The only dynamic object in this video is an abstract and strange image whose

colour and sound resemble a UFO. The object appears suddenly and then disappears.

Once it is in the yard, then it is inside the house and then duplicated three times in the

street. The strange object can be understood as a visual manifestation of the uncanny; a

symbolic embodiment of anxiety that emerges and then disappears abruptly inside the

soul of the one who experienced the traumatic memory.

This specific house is a mute witness, locating the story within a certain space, but

also perpetuating the distress and the bond of silence, and cooperating with the criminal

and the victim alike. Voicing oneself is an expression of self-representation, of telling a

narrative from an individual point of view. It is opposed to silence/invisibility/non-

existence in language and society.20 The voice becomes an emblem of the historical

effort of women to move from transparency to visibility.21

Women's voice has been theorized and discussed in several Israeli feminist

writings and artworks. For example, Talya Pfefferman22 examines the feminine voice

expressed in an autobiographical book titled The Life of a Worker in Her Homeland

(1935), written by a Zionist female worker named Henya Pekelman. Pfefferman

suggests that women who participated in the Zionist revolution experienced

disillusionment and disappointment after their immigration to Palestine. Their

expectations to be equal to the male Zionist pioneers have failed miserably. Despite their

enthusiastic recruitment, they were absent for many years from the official

historiography of Zionism. The private story of Henya Pekelman reveals discrepancies

between the declared ideology of equality and the reality of exclusion and discrimination

against women.

Pekelman, who began her path as a vibrant and assertive activist in the pioneers'

movement in her hometown in Bessarabia in Eastern Europe, was employed, after her

immigration, by a major tobacco enterprise. Following her rape by another pioneer, she

collapsed. Finding herself pregnant from the rape, she was forced to move to the Galilee,

a remote northern region of Palestine/Israel, in order “to deal with her personal tragedy”

on her own. The daughter she gave birth to was never recognized by the father and died

when only a few months old, under questionable circumstances. Henya was arrested on

the unfounded suspicion of poisoning the baby. Henya's life experiences following the

assault were accompanied by feelings of loneliness, exclusion and persecution, until her

suicide at the age of 38. Her voice had been muted.

Notably, Henya's story exemplifies the patterns of silence and muteness of women

in a dramatic historical period. Henya Pekelman's story can be analogized to Yifat

Giladi's video. The video artist also tries to track down a dark tale of sexual assault in the

past; albeit her story is directly connected to her personal life. Giladi is shattered by the

wall of silence erected by her mother's generation, a generation that is unable to confess.

This video thus documents the frustration and despair of the daughter generated by the

suffering of her mother; an agony that is doomed to be disregarded and excluded from

the national and familial narrative alike.

Conclusion

My project The Uncanny XX was stimulated by Sigmund Freud's 1919 ground-breaking

essay The Uncanny, a concept referring to the domestic and the familiar sphere and its

obscure danger, a hidden, unknown, mysterious threat. It soon became evident that the

two meanings are intertwined in the home sphere. The exhibition The Uncanny XX

explored sexual anxieties in the works of Israeli women artists that reflect the

phenomenon that I define as the “Feminine Uncanny”. Since Freud's research ignored

the specific fears of women in their domestic environment, I felt it important to expose

the uncanny experiences and memories of women that relate to incest, rape or threat by

a family member. The house itself has been reconsidered in this chapter as a site of

silence and as a physical space of memories.

The long process of preparation for the exhibition, and the intimate sharing of

feelings and thoughts of the artists, taught me that women artists indeed feel a certain

erotic anxiety and threat in regard to their home environment, even if they have never

personally been exposed to a real threat inside their homes. The artists expressed this

anxiety not from an egocentric point of view, but from a more general, empathetic

perspective on women's lives.

I believe that this exhibition contributed an artistic point of view on sensitive

social issues such as the exploitation and exclusion of women and girls by the men who

are supposed to be their guardians, as much as sexual injustice within the home and the

false and paralyzing idealization of female sexuality both by men and women. In a

society in which the media regularly report on the murder of women by their husbands

and on incest and domestic violence on a daily basis, it is important that the voice of

women will be heard and their perspective be widely disseminated. Such exposure of an

alternative, feminine, point of view is intended to raise the awareness of significant

types of concealed masculine oppression.

The artists and I hoped that the exhibition would be a starting point for a

meaningful public discussion of the status of women in Israeli society at the beginning

of the 21st century, and that it would promote recognition of the importance of such

courageous cultural and artistic representations. Obviously, this is not enough. An

artistic display is limited to the small number of interested visitors who attend the

exhibition. Nevertheless, art cannot be dedicated solely to presenting a social agenda.

Art is primarily intended to express the creator's inner world in the most sincere manner.

It is hoped that future work in this field will combine academic study and writing

together with artistic expression in order to encourage more caring, understanding and

recognition of these painful issues.

Notes

1 Freud (1919).

2 Freud (1919): 1.

3 Lacan (1982).

4 De Beauvoir (1949).

5 Wolf (1991).

6 In Israel too, the media reports about daily violence of husbands against their wives; as well as

reports about incestuous fathers and abusive male employers, an issue extensively discussed by the

Israeli media in 2009-2011 because of President Moshe Katzav's, his trial, conviction and

imprisonment for rape. Moshe Katzav served as the eighth President of Israel. The end of his

presidency was marked by controversy, stemming from allegations of rape of one female

subordinate and sexual harassment of others. In a landmark ruling, Katsav was sentenced to seven

years in prison. On 7 December 2011, he began his prison sentence.

7 Cixous (1975).

8 Freud (1922).

9 Cixous (1976): 8

10 The participants in The Uncanny XX: Lee he Shulov, Alma Machness-Kass, Yifat Giladi, Yael

Azoulay, Hinda Weiss, Keren Ella Geffen, Vered Aharonovitch, Reut Asimini, Jonathan

Hirschfeld. The works were made in a variety of techniques, such as video art, sculpture, painting,

drawing and computerized image-processing.

11 Illouz & Wilf (2004).

12 Sasson-Levy (2006).

13 Kristeva (1982); Bourdieu ([1960] 2003).

14 Butler (1993).

15 Butler (1993): 33.

16 Irigaray (1985).

17 Rozmarin (2003): 87-88.

18 Vanitas (Latin , “vanity”)  in art, a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in

the early 17th century. A vanitas painting contains collections of objects symbolic of the

inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures

(Encyclopedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/623056/vanitas).

19 Ofrat (2009).

20 Pfefferman (2011): 24.

21 In her famous performance of the hit song O Superman from the 1980s, for example, the artist

Laurie Anderson wears a special device that she invented herself on her mouth. This musical tool

produces the voice of a man and changes her performance in a way that creates a gender-bending.

This act suggests that a man's voice will be better heard in the public sphere than the voice of a

woman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzYu88jIDYs

22 Pfefferman (2011).

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