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EXPOSE YOURSELF TO ART

Towards a Critical Epistemology of Embarrassment

Gwyneth Siobhan Jones

Goldsmiths

University of London

PhD Thesis

I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own.

Gwyneth Siobhan Jones

CONTENTS:

Abstract : p 3

Introduction : An Introduction to Embarrassment p 5

Chapter 1: In The Gallery: Gilbert & George ‘Major Exhibition’ p 74 at Tate Modern Chapter 2: Interface: On using anecdote and theory to account p 116 for the embarrassment of Jemima Stehli’s Strip Chapter 3: Face to Face: The ethics and the cost of looking p 153 for Franko B Chapter 4: Inside Out: Confessions of sentimentality in the p 184 performance art of Adrian Howells Chapter 5: Singled Out: On being interpellated by indecency p 217 and intimacy in Gilbert & George’s Sodom Chapter 6: Face Value: The discrediting of self-image in p 254 Sarah Lucas’s self-portraiture Chapter 7: Outcome: Towards a critical epistemology of p 293 (Conclusion) embarrassment...

Bibliography p 320

An Introduction to Embarrassment

This project was sparked by a chance encounter with a curious quotation; We wanted to do art to be embarrassed. Art that embarrasses ourselves. I think we still do that. We are very embarrassed sometimes at what we are doing, and that’s a good feeling. When it hurts then its true for us.^1

The sentiment expressed by Gilbert & George made me pause, for I too sometimes feel embarrassed by art. As a spectator, I am sometimes embarrassed by an encounter with an image which can hurt, like a punctum , and I find I am drawn to images that have this capacity; images that unsettle, unnerve, that undo my sense of self. I am not speaking of a strong emotional response; of the impact of the sublime, of shock, or disgust, but a more minor affect; an awkwardness, a sense of the inappropriate, accompanied perhaps by a double-take, a look-and-look-away. These small but dysphoric feelings are at odds with accepted notions of aesthetic appreciation, or indeed any kind of appreciation. In what way is this ‘a good feeling’? Gilbert and George’s claim that embarrassment is a productive artistic strategy that they link to creativity (and to love) has prompted me to reconsider embarrassment, both as a spectatorial experience and as a critical device.^2 The questions I want to consider are; within the context of spectatorship, how does

(^1) The comment on embarrassment was originally made to Anthony d’Offay and recalled by Gilbert The Words of Gilbert & George in ‘London’s Living Sculpture: Interview with Robert Becker 1982’ (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997). p136. Gilbert&George, (^2) Mark Lawson interviewed G&G in 2011 and asked them to comment on the embarrassment quote, they replied that it is still very relevant to their creative processes: George: ‘The only thing we can compare it with is when one’s deeply attracted to a new person, then everything else is different not just that person, but the house and the garden, and the air, the atmosphere, everything is exalted because of that feeling.’ Gilbert: George: Its exciting. ‘It is embarrassing, it is difficult... you would like to run away from it.’ Gilbert: And it’s exciting because it is that edge, it must be like being on the front no? It is all exciting and nervous making, and at the same time that’s the best thing that you can do. Louise Bourner, "Mark Lawson Talks to Gilbert and George," (BBC, 2011).

intelligence.^6 And in Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Nicholas Ridout theorises embarrassment as the ‘predicament of the audience’; a situation in which the audience is ‘caught looking’ and this is figured as a form of exposure, almost an indecent exposure, that in its difficulty is a cause of both pleasure and pain. But beyond these texts, embarrassment is without a critical discourse. It figures in fiction, but academically has been largely ignored. Ridout notes that embarrassment ‘does not make theoretical claims, but subsists in the empirical.’^7 Can there be a theory of embarrassment, or are the two terms quite irreconcilable? Embarrassment as an academic subject is small and self-effacing, it is anxious to be overlooked and complicit in its own marginalisation. In fact, the problem seems to be one of tautology; embarrassment is embarrassing.

The lack of interest in embarrassment cannot be fully explained by its negativity; other dysphoric emotions have their discourses. This seems to be particularly the case in queer theory, where there is a rich vein of enquiry into the dynamic between negative affect and critical thinking. In Queer Optimism Michael Snediker discusses this, noting queer theory’s ‘habitation of this pessimistic field’ and proposing that this reflects a concern with ‘ontological instabilities’.^8 Queer work of this stripe might include the following writers and texts: Judith Butler cites melancholy as constitutive of gender strategies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick inhabits shame, writing from within on its queer and critical potential and she is followed by others writing on shame as the queer emotion. In No Future, Lee Edelman mines the death drive to think almost unthinkable opposites to futurity. Leo Bersani advocates the potential of self- shattering as a disintegration of self through sexuality, and replicated in art and

(^67) Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). p1.

Cambridge University Press, 2006). p84.Nicholas Ridout,^ Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems^ (Cambridge: (^8) Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). p4.

criticism. Judith Halberstam writes about The Queer Art of Failure which runs counter to what she terms ‘the toxic positivity of contemporary life’ asking instead, what reward does failure offer? Lauren Berlant writes about the disappointment of Cruel Optimism as an endlessly self-defeating desire. Jane Gallop has edited an edition of Women’s Studies Quarterly on Envy, another disprised and disavowed feeling. Sianne Ngai has produced a ‘bestiary’ of Ugly Feelings, which includes irritation and anxiety, arguing for the critical potential of ‘the aesthetics of negative emotions’.

A sizeable number of writers and theorists then have attended to the critical ‘value’ of other disagreeable feelings, and largely, they are not works of rehabilitation or re- valorisation. There is a (sometimes) tacit understanding that the project of these various texts is not to promote the qualities of negative feelings as neatly reversed to constitute positivity, but to explore a negative value on its own terms. Edelman makes this point explicitly, describing his work as; ‘... the impossible project of queer opositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such, which is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition.’^9

In ‘opposing the logic of opposition’ Edelman, and other theorists working in the field of negative affect have opened up a critical space in which it is possible to sidestep the usual prescriptive binaries, attending instead to areas of ambivalence and ambiguity, and so to ascribe some value to the worthless, and to look at the overlooked without converting it. This thesis, conceived within that space, and without an agenda of revalorisation, proposes embarrassment as a significant addition to the existent and emergent negative bestiary. What I believe embarrassment has to offer is a singular mode of embodied thinking, and this thesis

(^9) Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). p4.

DEFINING EMBARRASSMENT

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a potential origin of ‘embarrass’ as the Portuguese embaraçar from baraço a halter, and I imagine myself wearing one when I have made an ass of myself.

My working definition of embarrassment for this thesis builds on studies of emotion written from the perspectives of sociology and psychology which at its most succinct, would be that embarrassment is ‘an aversive self-consciousness’. That definition is however further inflected and informed by supplementary interpretations from etymology, linguistics, queer theory, gender studies, literature, and philosophy. I am particularly concerned with embarrassment as a ‘loss of face’, or ‘the discrediting of one’s own image’, as a discredit that works to endorse social norms of being and belonging. And as I am writing about embarrassment, I feel bound to pay attention to words as both cause and effect. I take embarrassment to be an awkwardness, perhaps even an awkwardness of language.

Dictionary definitions of embarrassment give a number of different strands of meaning not strictly pertaining to emotion but suggestive of feeling. Embarrassment is a blockage that impedes progress derived from ‘embaras’, an accumulation of driftwood blocking a waterway. The concept of a blockage is explored in thesis both thematically and in the methodology as a moment of pause... when thought is interrupted by emotion. As I shall discuss, a framework for thinking through the blockage of embarrassment and harnessing the pause it creates as a moment of cathectic intensity is offered by the somewhat outdated resources of anecdotal theory and reader-response criticism. The concept of a blockage also resonates

with Erving Goffman’s account of embarrassment in the social context as a moment when the self is present but ‘not “in play”’.^11

Embarrassment is also defined as a difficulty, and as a difficulty, embarrassment is often financial, and can be a difficulty of either too much or too little. Difficulty as lack is a ‘financial embarrassment’ or ‘pecuniary difficulties’, and as Ridout observes, the wordiness of ‘being unable to meet one’s obligations’ seems to euphemistically avoid speaking plainly of debt, and only makes matters worse. In contradiction to the inferred lack stands the description of excess as ‘an embarrassment of riches’ which is more than one knows what to do with. Whilst an explicitly financial embarrassment is considered in Chapter Three, more broadly, instances of both lack and excess are explored throughout as elemental to embarrassment.

Furthermore, embarrassment is defined as a state of doubt; it is a complication, perhaps the self-inflicted convolution of a predicament of our own making. The doubtfulness of embarrassment is manifested in this thesis as an instability of knowledge and of claims to knowledge, in fact, on the important critical position of confusion or doubtfulness that embarrassment can produce. When so much of the meaning and indeed value of contemporary art is predicated on spectatorial response, the spectator may feel burdened by a duty of care towards the artwork, to have the right response, the right sort of response, to know what we are expected know and feel what we are expected to feel. At times however, spectatorial response may be quite insubstantial or awkward to articulate.

From the viewpoint of the social and psychological sciences, embarrassment is generally defined as an ‘unpleasant self - consciousness’. And that turn towards the self is used here first and foremost to focus attention, within the parameters of the (^11) Goffman, Interaction Ritual p101.

There are two further aspects of embarrassment that emerge from social and scientific studies of emotion which prove to be significant; firstly, that embarrassment always assumes the presence, either real or imagined, of an ‘other’, and secondly, that there are two strands to embarrassment in which the ‘other’ is elemental. The two parts of embarrassment involve exposure and evaluation and it is ‘the other’ to whom we are exposed, and by whom we are evaluated. The other sees and judges, and, presumably, finds (me) wanting. The existence of two separate (but almost inseparable) strands is theorised by Michael Lewis who establishes that the capacity to experience the two parts of embarrassment develops sequentially during childhood.^14 First comes the self-conscious ‘exposure embarrassment’ dependant on cognitive skills and self-referential capacities requiring the maturity to know the difference between self and other. The child is seen by one that he knows is not he, and he also knows that the ‘he’ that is seen is his self.

The second stage adds that ‘self’ and ‘other’ are not only different, but that differences are value laden, and so the relation between the seer and the seen is hierarchical. In this second stage, the development of the capacity for ‘evaluation embarrassment’ requires additional knowledge of social norms, and an aspiration to conform, to excel, or to please. This time, embarrassment causes the child to realise that he has failed to do, or be, what was expected of him and that his failure has been seen by the other. Lewis defines evaluation embarrassment as ‘the discrediting of one’s own image’, and the discredit, like the other may be either real or imagined. Embarrassment then, lies in the perceived attention of the other, and the failure of the self, in this very moment, to be, and to be seen to be, as good as it should be, or could be.

(^14) Michael Lewis, "Embarrassment: The Emotion of Self-Exposure and Evaluation," in Self Conscious Emotions: The Psychology of Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, and Pride Price Tangney and Kurt W. Fischer(New York: The Guildford Press, 1995). , ed. June

Turning towards the humanities, I want to add two further accounts of embarrassment that have contributed to my understanding, and have shaped both the context and methodology of my research. Jean-Paul Sartre’s account in both theory and fiction of embarrassment as an agonising, obsessive self-consciousness has highlighted the limitations of ‘theory’, but also encouraged me to be ruthless in my introspection, and Roland Barthes, who frequently mentions embarrassment lightly, in passing, as a minor but noteworthy experience provides a paradigm for paying attention to the embodied and situated self as a way of thinking. From Sartre, I take embarrassment as an intense exposure that is a threat to my subjectivity, a slavery that denies my mastery. But it is from Barthes that I take embarrassment as a dis comfort to be lived.

Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, particularly Being and Nothingness , is often invoked in relation to shame, and this will be considered later in this thesis, but in Sartre’s works of fiction it is embarrassment rather than shame that figures frequently and vividly as an acute self-consciousness over the sometimes trivial matters of existence. Those of his characters, who exist for the reader from the inside out, suffer the exposure and evaluation of embarrassment; they feel disappointment in their appearance, their behaviour, their thoughts and motivations. They are pitilessly analytical of their own smallest feelings. In The Age of Reason , for example, there is the following encounter in a bookshop between Daniel Sereno and Boris Serguine. They are discussing philosophy. ‘I suppose you like it,’ said Sereno. ‘Yes’ said Boris who felt himself blushing for the second time. He hated talking about what he liked: it was indecent. He had the impression that Sereno guessed as much, and was being deliberately tactless. Sereno eyed him with an air of penetrating intentness.^15

(^15) Jean Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason , trans., Eric Sutton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979 (first published 1945)). p145.

who developed the discursive potential of the gendered, embodied, situated, and contingent self as a catalyst for critical thought.

The last piece in my composite definition is descriptive; an attempt to capture the unruly, feeling-ness of experience in language. Embarrassment, as an ‘aversive self-consciousness’ is, for the narcissistic self, a two-edged sword. To be looked at, to look bad, to imagine that I am looking foolish, is seductively appalling. Embarrassment acts as a catalyst for Alice in Wonderland sensations; of being oversized and clumsy, the most vast and visible thing on the horizon. Everybody is staring. I am a large object of ridicule. This makes me want to shrink, to disappear; I would drink from the little poison bottle with the ‘drink me’ label, in the hope of shrinking to some vanishing point. I wish I could fall through a crack in the floor; I want the earth to swallow me up. And yet, just as embarrassment enlarges, it also belittles. I am so small, so despicably insignificant, the smallest and most overlooked beetle on the planet. I crave the ‘eat me’ cake, to regain stature and restore equilibrium. Sometimes, but not always, the feeling of embarrassment is manifested in a blush, at the very moment I most desire composure, the confusion advertises itself on my face, a bright glowing, drawing attention to itself in a stupid act of self-sabotage. When I most wish to go unnoticed, my face becomes more noticeable. The contradiction of large and small, of visibility and invisibility is described by Nicholas Ridout as ‘the action of a body that knows itself to be both everything and nothing’.^18 This contradiction is, for me, a source of continuing fascination. Embarrassment as I experience it is a pulsating hyper-aliveness, of being flawed.

(^18) Ridout, p91.

EMBARRASSMENT AND ITS NEIGHBOURS:

Embarrassment may be imagined as situated within a continuum of feeling and according to Miller cited above, shares ‘fuzzy boundaries’ with its near neighbours. On one side are the milder feelings of modesty and self-consciousness, followed by anxiety and then embarrassment, and on the other, the weightier and darker feelings of shame and guilt. In defining embarrassment it might be helpful to consider two of the feelings that it is sometimes likened to, but different from.

(i) ANXIETY- EMBARRASSMENT Whilst there are some similarities between anxiety and embarrassment they are relatively superficial and result largely from proximity and overlap. A person in an unfamiliar or stressful situation might be anxious about the possibility of embarrassment, or alternatively, might be embarrassed about displaying anxiety when they would have preferred to appear confident. Furthermore, an anxious person might be prone to a high degree of embarrassability or an easily embarrassed person may be frequently anxious about being ambushed by embarrassment. Whilst some somatic similarities are evident, the significant difference between the two feelings is one of timing; anxiety is forward looking and anticipatory whilst embarrassment is reactive and contingent on event, incident, or scenario and so is a feeling of a present moment. Even when embarrassment is remembered, and of a past moment, it tends to make us re-live the moment, the feeling, and so becomes again insistently present tense.

(ii) EMBARRASSMENT - SHAME The difference between these two is often characterised as nothing more than intensity, but that is an over-simplification. Additionally, the moral valence of embarrassment is much weaker than that of shame; although embarrassment

In Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, and Exploring Affect Tomkins extensively uses the term ‘shame’ to describe feelings that are certainly, to my English sensibility, more properly understood as embarrassment. Tomkins (an American) uses ‘shame’ to name the whole axis of feelings that range from shyness and mild exposure embarrassment to the self-contempt of deep and lasting proper shame. This is Tomkins’ account of the arousal of ‘shame’.

... because one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or because one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange, or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar, or one started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger.^20

This, for me, describes not shame but embarrassment with a remarkable degree of precision. It accurately accounts for the foolishness, the inadvertency, and the mildness; it is relational and conflates image and imaginary in visual terms of strangeness.

Elspeth Probyn’s work on shame, makes some similar claims to those I will make for embarrassment, for example, that shame can be self-evaluative. Following Tomkins, she argues that shame is connected to interest. Shame happens when interest is almost, but not completely eradicated. For Probyn, the potential of shame is crystallized in the following quote from Tomkins; ‘... the pulsations of cathexis around shame, of all things, are what either enable or disenable so basic a function as the ability to be interested in the world.’^21 This serves to highlight the difference between her work on shame and mine on embarrassment. Probyn moves outward from shame to consider collective shame in ‘national and cultural narratives’ as an interest ‘in the world’ whereas for me, embarrassment persists in returning to the

(^20) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (^21) Tomkins cited in Elspeth Probyn, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). p135. Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). p14.

very much smaller sphere of the self, so that when she writes of a politics of shame, it is a national and cultural politics, but my politics of embarrassment is tethered to a more inward looking identity politics. As Ridout comments; ‘Where shame can define a culture, embarrassment wouldn’t presume’.^22

Jean-Paul Sartre writes of shame and embarrassment with embarrassment pertaining specifically to the embodied self and shame used more widely and more abstractly as an affect experienced in contexts of ‘being-in-itself’. The interesting differentiation between the two in Sartre’s work is that shame occurs most frequently in his theoretical philosophy, and embarrassment is more prevalent in his fiction. This bears out Ridout’s observation quoted earlier that embarrassment makes no theoretical claims but ‘subsists in the empirical.’ Shame is effective as a philosophical proposition; embarrassment is no more than a feeling. For Sartre, the experience of shame carries a moral weight that seems not to be predicated on any actual wrongdoing, but merely on being objectified and that this is in itself ‘shameful’. Sartre contends that there is such a thing as ‘original shame’, which like ‘original sin’ is an inescapable problem of being. Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in a state of nakedness are only a symbolic specification of original shame; the body symbolises here our defenceless state as objects. To put on clothes is to hide one’s object state; it is to claim the right of seeing without being seen; that is to be pure subject.^23

Whilst I doubt the state of nakedness could or should be claimed as intrinsically shameful, I do believe it can, in some situations, be embarrassing, and furthermore, I would suggest that nakedness can stand symbolically for the exposure of embarrassment; for the self as object. In the artworks considered here, nakedness is a recurring theme, each time raising issues of exposure and object-ness. (^2223) Ridout, p84.

2008 (first published 1943)). p312.Jean Paul Sartre,^ Being and Nothingness , trans., Hazel E. Barnes (Abingdon: Routledge,