BODY OR IDENTITY

Jenny Saville is considered as Britain’s treasured contemporary female painter. Through her painterly raw style, subjects and arresting use of scale Jenny Saville is one of the most valued living painters. This essay will analyse four of Saville’s artwork’s considering how she confronts the cultured objectification of the female body. Four images have been selected to help demonstrate and discuss the theme of the body in relation to identity and to show how important they are in Saville’s work.

Born in Cambridge England 7 th of May 1970 the artist earned her BA hons Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. From here she was supported by the art collector Charles Saatchi who acquired her whole degree show setting off her artistic career and her future as a member of the ‘Young British Artists’.

Noted for her monumental, female, nude oil paintings captivated by blood, flesh and the mass of the body, Saville takes a feminist approach and rather than sexualize or objectify she exposes the raw body in crammed and intimate compositions, through this approach the body transforms into what looks like fleshy landscapes.

It could be argued that she is purely fixated on the depictions of identity, however the topic the body’ is just as critical in her work and is shown through her skilful rendering of the material of the body and its existence within a space. In some cases the movement and structure within a space are explored.

In ‘Trace’ the body fills the entire space and is a good example of body shadowing out an identity. We presume it’s a women because of the bra and knickers references, sharp, cutting, scratched, painful marks left on the body. Without these scars this body could be male or female. The flesh of the body denies us any identity except to believe it is of a women.

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Trace 1993-94

Oil on canvass

Trace depicts a nude female captured from behind. At a glance, it’s almost abstract, cropped and chopped into a box, the body barely fits, almost as if the subject has been authorized to freeze on the spot. The presence of a medical examination is apparent, the light is harsh and immediately exposes the helpless body.

The painting is realistic, yet the brush strokes still have an engaging freeness, where she forms expressive, gestural strokes and with the use of brush and colour she creates an emotional charge.

"the anxiety that comes from living with flesh.’’ (Suzie Mackenzie 2005)

The body is intrusive yet vulnerable the slightest background is visible and hints at a medical, cold blue.

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The whole image is clinically dominated, muted with hints of stained yellowy brown against the pale skin tone, aspects of decaying blue and grey swell to the surface of the skin, where temporary sunken, sore and red engravings hold the remained traces of the woman’s underwear. Saville reveals a complete opposite to the popular cultured drenched images of stereotyped woman in their underwear. For example, those images associated within The Sun Newspaper, where perfected, airbrushed, undernourished women lie around in idealistic settings with not a care in the world. They appear to show no awareness about their own body as a living breathing thing vulnerable to changes often out of our control.

'I don’t make paintings for people to say we should look at big bodies again and say they are beautiful.... its more that they are difficult, why do we find body's like this difficult to look at? '(Josie Vallely 2012)

The work arises from of the existence of flesh, its heaviness and touch. The subject conceives vulnerability, the body suggests provocation from the bareness and certainty and is absolutely unidealized with no hint of seduction.

Exemplifying the stripped-down truth Saville’s devotion to the refusal to objectify the idealized form that is continually pushed through the media to make society believe that this is the norm, is clearly shown in ‘Traced’. Here Saville reveals the weight of self-hatred that has been inflicted upon society for centuries and continues to be so. Saville depicts a totally different viewing of the female form, a viewpoint we rarely see, a woman who looks like she has been through pain and has the marks to show.

Saville is challenging idealized beauty and exposing the appalling emotions that stereotyped bodies project on women making them feel they must disguise their true image and even worse hide themselves.

In the painting ‘Host’ Saville goes further and questions our perception of the body and uses an animal to depict what at first glance could be the torso of a bloated baby or a women. This is a fleshy piece, the body of a creature. Again the body is without a specific identity, it could be human but it seems not.

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Host,2000

Oil on canvas

304.8 x 457.2 cm 120 x 180''

‘I like the down and dirty side of things’ (Hudson.M 2014.)

A pig carcass unloaded and adopting most of the canvas. The body is presented on a surgeon- like table. Like most of her paintings a blur between human and beast is visible and at first glance it looks like a discarded woman’s torso. Then disturbed by the many nipples, suddenly the body and what we, thought of as a woman now confronts us.

‘’Saville’s human subjects, often bleeding or violently gripping their own flesh, bear a stark resemblance to her portraits of butchered animals, both grotesque and objectified.”( Artsy net N.D )

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The painting is constructed of rough violent brush strokes that form a truthful piece. The attention to the detail of the nipples is a further distinctive element and seems to dominate the rest of the painting. Regardless of the whole piece it is the nipples that grasp our attention and look significant, they could be seen to represent the body as a feeding machine, an ‘object’ used and disposed of at the hands of the media.

This piece is not sexualized or idealized for the satisfaction of men. Saville has not created a classical depiction of the female body she has thought deeper and defined the true purpose of breasts to nourish their young ones not to satisfy and feed men’s thirst.

Propped, 1992 Oil on canvas

213.5 x 183 cm

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This depicts A large woman, centred and presented on a narrow stiff stool, awkwardly propped, her head pulled back with an offended glimpse at the viewers, her large hands violently, clawing her skin.

The composition is balanced. In the foreground a clambering form built of gestural brush stokes forms a realistic body, whilst droopy exaggerated smears of paint create a wall leaving a dejected awareness. The pigments are bare and apologetic, the back-ground made of dirty stained grey and ultramarine whilst the foreground a lumpy body, cold with elements of orange and reds associated with embarrassment peer through the skin.

Over the surface scratched words dominate the figure.

‘‘Saville has carved directly into the material a quote by the feminist writer Luce Irigaray, which reveals her concerns: “If we continue to speak in this sameness, speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other again.”

“Irigaray’s message clearly stresses a need to re-appropriate the female body, which has been conquered over time by the language of patriarchy. The quote is inscribed backwards and physically separates the viewers’ space (our “real” social space) from that of the figure, as if we, the spectators, were looking into a mirror at the subject”. (Noel. ND)

The woman’s body is monumental and feels important however the veiled pigment and discourteously overlaid text causes the woman to suggest rejection, screaming out rejection the woman is refused beauty.

When comparing ‘Propped’ to a classical Greek nude painting such as Femme Nue Endormie, the 17th century painting by Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn, here the female is lightly laid on soft bedding, the body is smooth and unmarked with golden jewels decorating the torso and seductively luring the viewer in. She is not speaking with us or asking anything of us, unlike in ‘Propped’ She is waiting to be devoured she has no power or control over the viewer except to offer up a passive feast a classical goddess, with references to being chained or owned. All this is in a stark contrast to the way Saville handles the body’s flesh and reality with all its flaws.

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In Saville’s ‘Propped’ the woman is stiff and unsettled, covered in blemishes with a distressed atmosphere overshadowing the whole. The piece relates more to a powerful male Greek sculpture such as the ‘Barberini Faun’.

The sizable Greek marble statue known as ‘Barberini Faun, Fauno Barberini’ by an unknown artist made during BC.

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The man presented on a hard rock masculine and powerful, sat with his legs wide open exposing his masculinity. It seems in the image ‘Propped’ the woman is powerful and strong and refuses to be categorised as a stereotypical beauty where no blood or life is exposed. However, the subject is as powerful and domineering as any depictions of male virility or power in classical sculptures or traditional paintings where men are always shown adorned with their possessions and depicted as strong and in control.

Closed Contact #10, 1995-1996

Linking her work to the topic of The Body Saville is responsive to the surgical procedures and the inner materials of the body such as fats and fluids, composing this examination of the human material as opposed to a figurative painter.

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“Saville posed for a series of photographs for the renowned fashion photographer, which shows her flesh—her body and face—pressed violently up against a sheet of glass, stretched and pulled to the point of abstraction. In an effort to better understand her subject of choice, Saville has observed many cosmetic surgical procedures in person, and wanted to capture the “pain and violence” (Abrams, 2016)

The piece is from the ‘Closed Contact Series’ exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in 2002. It is a perfect example of the body being handled as an unidentified form, a mould, faceless, almost a piece of meat or a surgically mutilated body. Using her own body and reforming it, the body is presented against a clear sheet of glass. Firmly forced, the body transforms into a beastly abstraction. The work is clear cut, induced by the muted teal background, a colour identified within cold, morbid bodies, often used in her paintings, that benefit her blemished effects. The image delivers an impression of a woman with lost identity mutated into a body with no being.

"The images offer, not a story, but an experience that begins in visceral uneasiness and gradually shifts to a haunted serenity. The discomfort is complicated. It is triggered partly by our sense of the instantaneous monstrosity of a normal human transformed by the spreading of the shape beyond what we understood as norma l.”

(Dunn.K 2001)

The images discussed above attempt to touch upon Jenny Saville as a painter of bodies perhaps even more than a painter of identities, although both cross over and are difficult to separate. The works are selected to support this argument. Her work is experiential, massive areas of the canvas filled with references to bodies in all shapes and forms. They dominate her work and when we have a face it is not the stereotype male or female face, often the identity comes through the references to the form which are women and not men. However, her works touch upon something beyond male or female but on the shared similarities of flesh, isolated and treated without any bias or not for the purpose of consumption or to satisfy the male gaze or man’s ego as in commissioned painting of kings or dukes. Nor as in in classical Greek art and to keep up the myth of the perfect form or to meet women’s often distorted idea of how they should look. Saville’s fleshy, bodies break out of all the norms and speak out in volumes

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about what we do to our bodies. How bodies are no more than flesh and blood and when viewed without any props force us to re-think what a body is. A body without an identity is a universal thing, we all have bodies and we are not all able bodied. Saville pushes this reality through scale, realism and paint.

Billie Taylor

References

Abrams, A. (2016) Available from https://news.artnet.com/market/jenny-saville-420992

[Accessed 10 Mar 2018]

Artsy net (No date) About Jenny Saville

Available from https://www.artsy.net/artwork/jenny-saville-brace

[Accessed 20 Mar 2018]

Dunn, K. (2001) Closed Contact Press Release Gagosian Gallery

Available from https://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/january-12-2002--jenny-saville--glen-luchford

[Accessed 02 April 2018]

Husdon,M. (2014) Jenny Saville ‘I like the down and dirty side of things’ The Telegraph.

Available from

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/10920986/Jenny-Saville-I-like-the-down-and-dirty-side-of-things.html

[Accessed 10 April 2018]

Mackenzie, S. (2005) Art Under the skin. The Guardian.

Available from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/22/art.friezeartfair2005

[Accessed 10 April 2018]

Noel, L. (No date) Jenny Saville: The Body Recovered. CUJAH

Available from https://cujahtemp.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/131.pdf

[Accessed 12 April 2018]

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Vallely, J. (2012) Essay: An Admired Abjection. issuu

Available from

https://issuu.com/josievallely/docs/layout_of_essay_2

[Accessed 15.April 2018]

Bibliography

Craig, J. (2005) The Body as Landscape IN: Saville, J. Jenny Saville. New York, Rizzoli, pp 8-11.

Schama, S. (2005) Interview with Jenny Saville IN: Saville, J. Jenny Saville. New York, Rizzoli, pp124-129.

Sally, O. (2009) THE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY ART, London Thames & Hudson, pp. 82-83

Billie Taylor

Billie Taylor