by Jesse Max Creed

At the MoMa, whose location below Central Park should provoke no dispute over territorial possession as is being discussed about the east-west divide for the Met, I discovered a bawdy, yet compelling piece on women in history entitled Notes in Time (1979) by the artist-against-injustice-turned-feminist Nancy Spero.

The piece finds itself in the middle of a dazzling exhibition most accurately described by its titled, Multiplex: Directions in Art 1970 to Now, open from now until July, 2008. The central message of the exhibition flows from the post-1945 artistic obsession with paradox, long brewing since impressionism’s ability to, at once, represent, yet distort reality. We have long abandoned the Platonic obsession with perfect imitation and harmony and embraced the beauty of asymmetries and paradoxes. In the section of works called Abstractions, the museum describes the paintings as visually communicating a message without conventional representation. To put it differently, a painting communicates to its viewer more a mood than a picture; in short, it is, paradoxically, the anti-image image. The paradoxes proliferate as the works are at once centralizing and decentralizing, structuring and de-structuring, layering and delaying, constituting and de-constituting, constructing and destructing, ad infinitum, reductio ad absurdum etc. I have always believed that these antitheses ultimately stem from the greatest modern paradox of all, order and disorder – order brought about by the political, economic, and social complexity of the modern state and, at the same time, disorder spawned by total war between these same states. In Nazi Germany, for instance, the most hierarchical and totalized society signified the New Order of the efficient modern state yet collapsed under the stresses of total war as Russian tanks shook the ground of Berlin and British aircraft bombed the architectural gems of Dresden.

In the section Mutability is appropriately located Spero’s work juxtaposing the long antithetical genres of painting and poetry, the image and the word, to form, yet again, another set of paradoxes: the word as image and history as dance. She presents a series of poetic texts deriding or belittling women alongside feminine images of women dancing in motion. The word meets image; history meets dance. As examples, you will see some of the images and texts attached to this post: Juvenal’s satirical depictions of women’s sexual impulses; the American poet Hilda Doolittle’s description of a woman’s weapon as neither sword, nor dagger, nor spear, but as persuasion; Spero’s own depiction of the feminine weapon as something not feminine at all, a pointy dick. Too many texts, too many images, too much history to be exhaustive for this post.

It is here that I found intellectual inspiration. Naturally, it aroused in me as one member of the tyrannical and oppressive gender a desire to reflect on where we were, where we are, and where we will be with respect to a woman’s role in our civilization.

It is no remarkable suggestion to note that, at the heart of our civilization, two women have scarred the reputation of this gender since the dawn of Western man: Helen of Troy and Eve of Eden. Both characters set in motion two of the (arguably) most important books in Western history, the Bible and Homer’s Iliad.

Helen, impulsively enraptured by her love of Paris, arouses the Spartan rage of the Greeks and ignites the fires of the Trojan war. Hers is the face that launched a thousand ships and, in her, men have concluded through the centuries that women represent an impulsive, short-thinking, and unrestrained lot. Until the rise of the feminist movements in the twentieth centuries, it was customary to draw several readings from this story ultimately leading to women’s demise: in search of vengeance for the unhappiness brought by her marriage to Menelaus, Helen exacted precisely what she sought by forcing the young and virile Greek from the warmth of his home and setting in motion the mobilization of entire civilizations. Or, to spin this story towards another poisonous reading, she was a feeble, weak woman unable to control herself against Paris’s seduction. If chastity is a virtue, Helen was soaked in vice.

That other noteworthy woman, seduced by the serpent, has been represented through the centuries as one who single-handedly brought about the fall of man – Eve. By her hand, man was introduced to mortality, corruption, and sin; man no longer incarnated, in whole, the divine and perfect image of God, but also harbored the Dante-esque tripod of earthly evils: the self-reflexive pride of a cat, the wrathful ferocity of a lion, and the deceitful guile of the she-wolf. By her hand – or rather her mouth – Man fell from the grace of God to the absurdity of our instinctive animal nature.

So, now, these stories of our origins as a Western society beg the question of where we are in Spero’s “dancing history.” Running for president of the single most powerful nation, Hillary Clinton seeks to fill the constitutional role of the president as commander-in-chief of the most sophisticated Armed Forces in the world. Contrary to Hilda Doolittle’s world, Hillary’s will represent one where woman bears the sword, the dagger, and the spear. Contrary to Spero’s metaphorical image, a woman will no longer carry a limpid dick across the centuries as her weapon. Contrary to Juvenal’s classical Latin poem, Hillary represents a woman who does not simply crave sex ravenously (clearly, this must be the case as shown by Bill’s smoking forays to fill this sexual void). She seeks not persuasion, but, rather, power and dominance. She no longer wants to write with the pen – she wants to wield the sword.

Knowing our human instinct to draw absurdly irrational and wrong conclusions, a lot is at stake for women, should one sit behind the desk at the oval office. I make this declaration not so much in the vein of masculine ignorance or as an uneducated imbecile; after all, I come from a household where my mother and sister are wildly successful.

The stakes of a woman president are inevitably high in light of the irrational science of interpretation. Despite what readings were drawn from the Helen story, it is often forgotten that Paris did not simply seduce Helen – he abducted or even raped her. His impulse to unclothe such a beautiful woman as Helen inspired within him an urge to forcefully seize and kidnap her. Yet, the ages have only recently seen the story convey this interpretation. So when I say a lot is at stake, I intend it to mean that should Hillary fail in her duties as officer – whether she is too pacific, impulsive, or irresolute – it will be hard to escape the possibility that her victories and vanquishes will be colored, for better or worse, by the history of women so poignantly portrayed, in image and word, by Spero.

Taking a page from a rather obscure medieval book The Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, which arguably sparked the first feminist debate in Western history between the leaders of the Paris universities and the medieval female writer Christine de Pisan, I can sum up the problem of interpretation. The allegorical character Reason, whose defining characteristic lies (surprise!) in her rationality, lectures the Lover, seduced and spellbound by a beautiful woman, on the sleepless nights, insuppressible and sometimes grotesque thoughts, and general anguish brought about by love. After hearing about love’s “peaceful hate and hateful peace” – what Shakespeare calls later love’s “sweet sorrow,” the Lover replies: “There are so many contradictions in this lesson that I do not know how to understand even one word of it. Yet I know how to recite it well by heart, for my heart has forgotten none of it at all.” We have come a long way from Helen of Troy or Eve of Eden, but cultural history – the aesthetics of interpretation – we cannot escape.