Dada Daddy

Jennifer Thatcher on what masculinist revisionism could learn from feminism.

At the very moment that women's studies is dropped from the university curriculum in Britain, a rash of books about masculinity appears on the shelves. An optimistic interpretation might imply that the women's movement has been so successful that it is handing over the theoretical reigns to help men achieve a greater degree of self-understanding. However, Goldsmiths professor Angela McRobbie, commenting on the issue in the Guardian in March, proposed a different, more unsettling context for the change in focus from women to men: 'Often it seems feminism has become a kind of private passion, a way of working through the intractable issues of the day in regard to sexuality ... But so denigrated and devalued is the women's movement that it is often hard to dislodge the assumptions that it routinely required hostility to men.' In other words, McRobbie is suggesting that, instead of being ignored with cheerful indifference by a super-confident next generation of post-feminist young women, 'women's issues' (childcare and domestic duties, equal pay and work opportunities, sexual harassment) have come to be seen as individual matters rather than as providing an opportunity for public debate - an unexpectedly retrograde reversal of the 'personal is political' mantra.

The rise in masculinity as a research area in cultural studies departments over the past decade (nothing so crude as 'men's studies'), on the other hand, seems to suggest a desire for a very public debate concerning the 'crisis' affecting men. Indeed, media role models of self-conscious masculinity have moved on since the 90s from the ambivalent figure of Gazza the crying footballer, who was as mercilessly mocked as he was lauded for his very unBritish emotionalism, to male politicians today, who, having previously got away with cooing over the odd baby close to election day, are now expected to shed a just discernible tear at the appropriate photo op; one week in April alone produced a double whammy from London mayoral candidates Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson: 'Teen street killing tale moves Boris and Ken to tears' ran the headline in London Lite. Anglo-American prime-time TV frequently gives us access to the confused and traumatised sub-conscience of outwardly successful men, who privately turn to therapists and mistresses to compensate for not living up to peer pressure and expectations. Among the increasingly sophisticated range of types, there's the killer with-a-conscience (TheSopranos), the overworked male executive with work/life imbalances (Mad Men), the liberal intellectual comedian (Curb Your Enthusiasm), and the time-travel fantasies about when men were more like 'real men' (Life on Mars).

The vogue for vulnerable (and preferably also goodlooking) men is also gaining momentum in the art world. Sam Taylor-Wood's 'Crying Men' series of 2004 turned famous actors emoting into art-world pin-ups, updating the New Man fantasy of the 1986 Athena poster Man and Babywith the pink-shirted metrosexuality of Hayden Christensen. Likewise, Bill Viola fans watch actors, both men and women, emote excruciatingly slowly, while fellow video artist Jesper Just uses the high production values of cinema for his obscurantist, mostly exclusively male narratives. If Germaine Greer's recent vilification, also in the Guardian, of women artists who use their bodies in their work _ conveniently forgetting she also got her kit off for the camera in her feminist heyday - attracted relatively little criticism itself, today the male narcissist is everywhere indulged: Dutch artist Philip Akkerman has been painting himself, and only himself, for the past quarter century, producing an extraordinarily diverse range of representations that takes inspiration from the art-historical canon. Where his oeuvre is rightly praised for its brand of obsessive-compulsive existentialism, one need only consider the barrage of criticism Tracey Emin has received over the years to note that sustained attempts at self-analysis by women are more likely to be treated as attention-seeking exhibitionism. The recent lifting of the taboo on masculine insecurity seems to afford even the most simplistic representations of emotional behaviour a compelling gravitas.

There is clearly plenty of fodder for the masculinity scholar in these new, ambivalent representations of men, which seem to mirror underlying societal insecurities about the position of the western man in relation to work, power and family - the well-documented statistics of failing schoolboys, disproportionate levels of male depression and difficulties with commitment. But where to begin? It seems that 'masculinity' research (at present mostly white heterosexual) is currently aligning itself methodologically with feminism and occasionally with queer studies - the same careful self-consciousness of the researcher as a gendered subject, and the same debates concerning essentialism versus social construction of gender. Perhaps this alignment is produced byfear of appearing to support a dominant male order. However, while apparently flattering the achievements of their feminist colleagues, the supposedly natural allegiance between masculinist and feminist studies can be highly problematic, especially when contesting the same historical domain.

David Hopkins's recently published book, Dada's Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp, tracks the quasi-mythical legacy of Marcel Duchamp up to the present day, setting him up as a kind of godfather to generations of male artists, who paid homage to him and helped pass the Dada torch on down an almost exclusively male lineage. Hopkins certainly succeeds in uncovering Duchampian references in some unexpected iconic works such as Jasper Johns's Flag, 1954, and Robert Rauschenberg's Bed, 1955. But one has to question the point of retracing a well-known masculinist modernist history, for, in doing so, Hopkinsrisks overriding long-standing feminist concerns (with which he claims sympathy) about a masculine-dominated account of art that ignores female influences. Hopkins's eagerness to celebrate masculinity and understandable reluctance to apologise for past Dada misogyny leads to a confusing scenario in which he finds himself offering the very tenuous possibility that, for example, Picabia's La Sainte Vierge, 1920 - a 01FEATURES> Sherrie Levine Fountain: 51996metaphorical ink splash on 'virgin' paper - is a celebration of female creativity rather than a crude, blasphemous joke about the deflowering of a virgin. Even Hopkins admits that 'it would be wrong to attribute conscious intentions to Picabia that he almost certainly did not have'. Overcaution here paradoxically leads to reckless interpretation.

Dada's Boys relies heavily on the notion of the 'homosocial' as coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - the boys' club attitude that has informed such legendary associations as the Dada and Surrealist friendships currently being honoured by Tate Modern's exhibition Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia; the macho drinking-buddy culture of the Abstract Expressionists; and the lad culture within the yBas. Hopkins makes much of the fine line between homosociality and homosexuality, quoting André Breton on his especially close relationship with Duchamp: 'Our friendship could have turned into a homosexual one if it had not expressed itself in surrealism instead.' Moreover, he sees in Robert Gober's Two Urinals, 1987, the amplification of potential homosexual connotations in Duchamp's original urinal, Fountain,of 1917.

If the Dadaists and Surrealists generally stuck to heterosexuality, they enjoyed a Catholic-bating love of genderbending experiments. Duchamp's alter-ego Rrose Sélavy is the most notorious example, but Hopkins takes time to highlight Man Ray's ambiguous portraits of transvestite entertainer Barbette and the masculine-looking Gertrude Stein (both published in 1934), as well as the Compensation Portraitsof 1942, in which Duchamp and Breton appropriated found images of often opposing genders to stand in for themselves and surrealist colleagues. Dada and Surrealism certainly challenged ruling bourgeois ideas of a clearly defined masculinity and the Catholic church's condemnation of non-procreative sexual practices, but ultimately they did little to dispel essentialist views on gender. Hopkins apparently mirrors their position; his stated interest in identifying the 'permutations in the heterosexual male position' permits him only to widen the parameters for male sexuality, all the while reinforcing the division between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Hopkins makes a clear case for a Dadaist principle of male separatism, and indeed also echoes this himself when he effectively dismisses all female heiresses to Duchamp other than Sarah Lucas, whose 'natural mannishness' brings the 'historical Duchamp up against his deepest fears'. Lucas's power, for Hopkins, is in resurrecting the fear of the new femme-hommethat emerged after the First World War, which he suggests terrified Dadaists into usurping feminine identities for themselves. It's a revealing admission of the Dada unease about powerful women, but a strangely backhanded compliment to Lucas. In addition, Hopkins accuses Sherrie Levine, whom he identifies as one of Duchamp's spinsters (an ironic reference to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the 'Large Glass' of 1915-23), of trying to 'compensate' for the latter's ambiguous politics with her versions of the Fountain. In another act of suspiciously essentialist analysis, he suggests that her gesture of muscling in on what had been a 'male-only conversation' between Duchamp and his disciples genders appropriation - in other words, that she paradoxically confirmedappropriation as a male strategy. But isn't it instead Hopkins's interpretation that genders appropriation? The Barbican's current exhibition,Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, includes a section called Ancestor Worship, in which the system of artistic homage and appropriation is more evenly split between men and women artists. Indeed Levine's bronze Fountain: 5, 1996, opens the show, playing up its futuristic, slightly alien quality.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Hopkins ends up championing Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle (1994-2002) as a potentially new departure for representations of masculinity. In another essentialist provocation, Hopkins even proposes that 'Barney annexes themes such as male competitiveness and striving to enigmatic fantasies as if the sheer peculiarity of male sexual identity or the ineffable nature of men's libidinal impulses were subjects in themselves'. If the choice of Barney allows Hopkins a sneaky pop at October critics who dismissed him, it smacks of a degree of desperation to find a new mascot for masculinist art, particularly as the author himself admits to the artist's 'uneven' aesthetic merit.

Amy Lyford's recent book Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War 1 Reconstruction in France self-consciously builds on feminist research to explore the socio-political context in which Surrealism operated. She claims that masculinity, like whiteness in the context of race issues, has too often been left out of debates about gender, and her research centres on anxiety about the precarious status of masculinity following the First World War, and how it might have informed the Surrealist penchant for a fragmented, often female, body. The significance of Lyford's contribution lies in reminding us of the very real fear of physical as well as psychological emasculation during wartime, and the extent of the Surrealists' exposure to male deformity. In a chapter gruesomely entitled 'The Aesthetics of Dismemberment', she examines the advancedreconstruction work carried out by surgeons at the military teaching hospital Val-deGrâce, where Louis Aragon and Breton worked as physicians during the First World War. In particular, she reveals the propagandist role of the hospital's public gallery, in which displays of wax and plaster casts, representing before-and-after reconstructive surgery, unrealistically promised a seamless recovery, even for the most horrifically disfigured faces and bodies.

While Lyford asks us to empathise with the horror of war in humanist terms, she also points to how gendered this trauma was perceived to be. Underpinning Lyford's study is the persuasive hypothesis that the rebuilding of a confident and healthy masculinity was key to the French government's need for a conservative 'return to order' following the devastation of war - in practical terms (reproduction, getting back to work) and as a symbolic carrier of ideology. Here Lyford follows film historian Kaja Silverman, who argues that the governing reality relies on an intact masculinity for its strength. Lyford's argument seems to move further away from essentialism than Hopkins's does. The mobilisation of masculinity as a political strategy - in this case to speed up the recovery of a wounded country -was clearly recognised by the anti-bourgeois Surrealists, who revealed the shakiness of this idealised image of masculinity by bouncing it back in distorted forms.

Nevertheless, Lyford is not immune either to writing over earlier feminist interpretations, despite a lengthy digression to rehabilitate Lee Miller as a knowing participant in Surrealist sexual experimentations, and a reminder that when it came to the Surrealists' formal research into sexuality, 'the majority of the statements by the predominantly male participantsdismissed women's experiences'. She argues, for instance, that André Kertész's distorted female nudes of 1933, in which women seem to participate in their own objectification, were in fact heavily cropped for publication, thus rendering invisible the apparatus (the giant mirror) responsible for the effect, and denying the 'self-analysis and auto-eroticism' that the model might have enjoyed during the shoot. Furthermore, by rediscovering the lost link between these and earlier portraits of distorted men, including Kertész himself, she finds evidence that the female nude, rather than reflecting a straightforward male fantasy, was here a carrier of earlier mutilation anxieties. While this interpretation might be seen as proor anti-feminist, depending on your view on Freudian fetish mechanisms or Lacanian symbolic castration, even Lyford admits that Kertész's transition from photographing mainly clothed men to mainly naked women was probably also a marketing ploy.

In their claim for a reappraisal of masculinity, both Hopkins and Lyford have, in different ways, been forced into making decisions on whether to correct, supplant or merely ignore previous feminist critiques of Dada and Surrealism. This leads to Hopkins reinforcing both gender and sexual divides, while Lyford mixes humanist empathy for male suffering with an acknowledgement that any attempt at masculinist revisionism must necessarily negotiate some tenacious accounts of misogyny. Indeed, Lyford's analysis concerns itself nearly as much with the status of women as the men who are her stated protagonists.

For an account of masculinity that takes into consideration both male vulnerability and misogyny, it is necessary to step outof the field of art history and into social anthropology. In Masculine Domination, 1998, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's rigorous analysis leaves no room for doubt that masculine domination, in spite of significant victories for women over the past half century, is still utterly the ruling order. In this order men themselves are prisoners of duty to the production and reproduction of symbolic capital (that can include both wealth and honour), while women are subordinate to biological capital. But - and this is where he is most interesting for us - Bourdieu sees the centuries-old gender division as an arbitrary categorisation that requires constant reaffirmation by the very institutions - family, church, state - against which Surrealists and feminists have railed. Bourdieu goes as far as arguing that anatomical difference - that which so naturally appearsto justify the social division of labour, for example - is itself socially constructed. It is only by reversing both the cause and the effectof essentialist arguments that we are able to see the situation clearly and to break out of the circular causality that continues to plague us. Bourdieu wisely counsels that the job of historians is to 'reconstruct the history of the historical labour of dehistoricization' or, to put it another way, the 'history of the agents and institutions which permanently contribute to the maintenance of these permanences' that have helped to disguise masculine domination.

Following this, we might suggest that any attempts at a masculinist as well as feminist analysis of art history should be welcomed if they are dedicated to undermining the naturalised 'permanence' of social institutions. Research into Dada and Surrealism, movements that were themselves involved in attacking the established order, might be judged especially rewarding. However, we should heed Bourdieu when he cautions that good faith is not enough to be an activist, for the pull to continually readjust findings to fit the dominant masculine ideology is extremely strong, however unapparent.

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia was at Tate Modern February 21 to May 26 2008. Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art is at Barbican Art Gallery March 16 to May 18, 2008, Philip Akkerman was at Mummery + Schnelle February 29 to April 12, 2008.

This article was originally published in May 2008/ No 316, pp1-4.

Jennifer Thatcher is director of talks at the ICA.