the caryatid manifesto
art and the female body
In art history women are both presence and absence; too much flesh yet slipping forever into immateriality. Blazoned, emblazoned, model and muse. Anatomised, eroticised. Subject to the gaze yet constantly evading it, escaping it, overspilling pictorial containment through their evocation of the body, its unruly realities. I find it hard to walk through certain galleries sometimes, thinking of Effie Gray on her wedding night, or Pygmalion, surrounded as I am by all these neoclassical nymphs, these painted ladies. What does it mean to bear the body? And to bear what comes with it, its heavy mythology, its millennia of mystification.
According to Vitruvius, the original caryatids, the figures bearing the Acropolis’s Erechtheion, represent the women of Caryae, punished with a lifetime of hard labour for their misplaced allegiance during the Persian invasion of Greece. This is disputed because the maidens smile softly, serenely. They do not look like they are suffering such a grave penalty. But even Niobe’s tears must be beautiful, as are Mary’s, miracles rendered pearlescent. Labour is a punishment women know; God decrees to Eve ‘in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’. And a third punishment, to be made object, adornment yet bastion, without which all edifices will collapse.
How can the artist re-create the caryatid, who volunteers herself willingly for pain, passively smiling beneath her heavy weight? I am sickened by her, almost, her feminine acceptance — such a contrast to her male counterpart, the striving Atlas. ‘They propose to stabilise her as object and to doom her to immanence’, writes Simone de Beauvoir of womankind, which is another way of saying they turn her into stone. How to free the caryatid from her immanence, her servitude? Her marble-flesh paradoxical putty, an offering, an Othering, the serenity of her Mona Lisa smile. How to armour the armless to carve her own angel free?
By making her real, says Duncan Grant, early in the twentieth-century. Grant — the only man to grace the Famous Women Dinner Service, long-lashed and pensive in Vanessa Bell’s rendering — depicts his caryatid with hands raised, hefting her burden like a woman carrying water. He unrobes her not to titillate but to realise her, not to make her Nature but to allow her her own nature. The roundness of her belly, so unlike the classical ideal. The dense hatching at her navel, her groin, her thighs which heave against one another. And above, her hands tapering, pencil fading, left open to the air, vanishing around her invisible load
.I don’t think she’s trapped, Grant’s caryatid, she’s too solid for that, with her thick trunk and legs, one foot pushing forwards in the moment of motion, much like his muscular lovers-wrestlers-dancers. Her lifted vessel is immaterial by comparison; she could break it, if she wanted, like the shattered amphora in the foreground of Janine Antoni’s Caryatid (2003), which stands before the artist’s inverted body, bearing the same vessel atop her head. She’s turned away, Antoni’s caryatid, we can’t see her face. She could be smiling or screaming. I think both, and am left with the impression that the woman has broken out of her painting, tossing her burden aside, eschewing the careful balancing act with which Antoni, woman and tightrope artist, is so concerned. Perhaps even discarding her female body itself, often presented as vessel, as w/tomb.
There are caryatids in Helen Chadwick’s enigmatic Oval Court (1986), stripped-back, pared-back caryatids, the artist’s tearful gaze atop baroque columns, above the famous renderings of her writhing, replicated body. What do these crying caryatids bear? They know, perhaps, the truth of the body, that which is manifest in the installation’s second room, which does not survive. Carcass, a two metre tube of rotting matter, which fermented in the gallery and exploded, and overflowed. The female body always leaky, always overflowing itself, always threatening the abject which must be expelled. How to contain it? Caryatid or carcass — how to be both? Of Mutability. ‘Hysterical’, Frieze calls Chadwick’s work, even long after the artist’s early death, and I agree, it is, but only in the sense that the hysteric has accessed a special kind of vision, an oracle’s-eye view (no wonder, given her descent from the mystic, the demoniac).
Women artists often assert the body by sublimating it, under water or its illusion, as in Chadwick’s cyanotypes or the blue-grey portraits of Francesca Woodman’s Blueprint for a Temple (1980), her friends clothed as caryatids, towering fourteen-feet tall and dignified. History written upon the body, the body writing its own history, inserting its faceless, furious self. When I saw these in person, I felt the opposite of the horror that sometimes grips me in galleries. Awed, adoring, I remembered the other origin story of the caryatids — that they represent priestesses of Artemis, dancing together. We assert the body by sublimating it. Female performance artists know that — Yoko shrouded in black fabric, or cutting it away, Marina silent before the gun. And to be caryatid is a kind of performance. One of placid passivity, to take it with a beneficent smile. How to shatter, like Antoni’s vessel? How to liberate the body from the mythology embedded in its flesh? A vanishing act, leaving the temple standing prop-less, or crumbling.
Unlike Chadwick, Woodman, and Antoni, and unlike in the arresting gaze of his own self-portraits, Grant does not become the caryatid. Even as he seeks to de-mythify her, he stops short, traps her on paper. Her eyes after all are downturned, pietà . Whereas you cannot avoid Chadwick’s subjectivity, which stares you down, challenges you to read her nudes which way you will. She was searching, the artist said in response to criticism, ‘for a vocabulary for desire where I was the subject and the object and the author’. Grant, queer and quiet, his desires criminalised til his eighties, might have understood. And Woodman, always vanishing at the edges of her spectral self-portraits, could have said the same. (Woodman and Chadwick, the dead-too-early girls, whose work is always made their own memorial. Sepulchral Juliets, like Grant’s friends Virginia, Dora).
In the tradition of the Metamorphoses it is often women who are changed, amber’d in stone or wood or sky. I want to say we can keep changing, that we can throw off our burdens and crack our marble casings, and dance wildly, empty hands waving, like funeral mourners or the free. I want to say we can make ourselves strange, and meet the gaze, and erect our own temples, build our own courts. My caryatid sisters, unmaking mythology by living life.
I wrote this last year for an art-writing competition it did not win; hence, Substack. Something a little different perhaps, and more pictures. I’d like to expand on it at some point.
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My last essay was on the uncanny collective dreams of our technodystopia. People seem to have missed it (poor post time? oversaturation? shadowban?) but you can read it here.
And if you’d like to read more of my writing on art, I wrote about modernist art last year, and David Wojnarowicz like, ages ago.
Great piece, and introduced me to a lot of art I was not familiar with.
The winner in our eyes, I think. I find your handling of academic/intellectual writing touchingly humane. Thank you. This was lovely.