Writing Girl-Machine: the inner journey is hard.

By Ruth Skilbeck

 I wrote this a few days ago, before the piece on Sex, Art and the Inner World, and am publishing it now here as part of the documentation of writing of the inner world, subjectivity and desire and the social, in Girl-Machine my novel in progress. After I wrote these notes (quoted below), I read the article on changing attitudes to women’s sexuality through history, which was very relevant to my thoughts recorded here, about my ancestors, and anxieties, also documented here were somewhat allayed. The experience of doing this writing, about the inner world and experiences of the self, in social contexts, has increased my awareness of how hard this can be emotionally. It increased my deep appreciation of the women artists working in all media, who create self-based art, that presents ‘naked’ reflections of themselves, honestly explores representations of sexuality, sexual selves, and female subjectivity, as personal experience and art reflection, as political and social, and their bravery in raising our level of consciousness on the social level through their doing so.

In effect it’s a way of literally and symbolically “occupying” the bodies of women that have been represented as ‘objects of desire’ by male artists throughout art history, as projections of male artists’ perceptions and devoid of female subjectivity.  Women artists are reclaiming female bodies, as their own subjects, and part of this is reflection and interrogation of the issues to do with “the gaze” – such as this article.

Diane Mantzaris,

Refugee: Slaves of State, 2012,

206cm (Height) x 120cm (Width)

C-Type Photograph

The power and value of this is that it counters the dissociation of contemporary society, and modernity which is literally and symbolically manifest in the mass media, and our largely unconscious ingestion of images, of representations of women as sexualized objects in advertising, mass media, and porn, that are dissociated from the people who are represented and the people who make the images- to make profit in capitalist consumer media society. The effects and affects of this dissociation is manifest and articulated by countless individuals around the world in symptoms of internalized anxiety and phobias about their own bodies, selves, and relations with others, creating barriers to real communication and meaningful relationships, in the cultures of neo-liberalism and consumer capitalism which create casualization in the workplace and in personal intimate relations between people. These are connected, through the unconscious feelings we have about ourselves, and our own self confidence and values about what is meaningful in life, appearance – and certain kinds of objectified “approved” appearance- has far too much “value” attached in the media cultures that are sponsored and fed and manipulated by advertising and vested profit interests in the products and ideologies re-presented and reproduced in media cultures.

Through women artists reclaiming the right to self-representation, and doing this they reposition the personal as political, and representations of desire as social, and their art counters the commodification and objectification of women that oppresses and subjugates women (and men) around the world. The processes of engaging with these artists and their works, and the wider social issues of the importance of women documenting and recording their own experiences, as personal reflection and art, for the purposes of raising awareness of consciousness of humanity and countering the agents of oppression of women, has also strengthened my faith in what I am doing in my writing, and its legitimacy, and driven away the temporary anxieties of creating this new work.  

Together we can create change, through mutual support and building community strength.

So I am continuing to write Girl-Machine, and it is almost finished.   I am publishing these notes from the moment of doubt to show that it is ok to have moments of doubt, it is part of the process of creating, and all artists have to face and find ways of dealing with this. My way here, is to make public as part of the process of writing, the notes and anxieties that are usually left out of public view, and excluded, so that the art work arrives as finished product, a fait accompli dissociated from the labour, sweat, pain and human toil of the process that created it and gave it birth.

I believe that part of the social and personal value of art is the connection it enables both audience and artists to the source of our humanity, what makes us human, our deepest selves, and our feelings, through communication- on a real level. So as part of this, I am sharing some of the inner journey of the process of making a work of self-based art from written language, concepts, memories, desire, and reflection on how women, and young women experience and live in society.

This is in contrast to the myth of the independent woman as “cold, inaccessible, and free” which was the way in which artist Tamara de Lempicka was described by her daughter, Kizette, in her self portrait (Autoportait in the Green Bugatti, 1925)  in the “machine age”, of the 1920s, driving her car: "The self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free! “This is also a myth I seek to explore, and puncture, in Girl-Machine, in London in the media consumer culture of 1980s when: “The ultimate kick is to remain completely impervious, to feel nothing, as the other person falls utterly in love with your; as remote, uncaring and invulnerable as a machine.” (Girl-Machine).

Saturday 16 March 2013 

Writing the inner journey is hard

It’s hard to remain or keep trying to remain conscious, and to be aware of how one feels, and try to have some understanding of where this is coming from.

It’s hard, and I am having a lot of difficulty over the past two or three days with barriers that have come up in my writing, of my inner censor, and I admit it is fear, that is causing some apprehension of the reception of my work if I publish writing on sexuality, and consciousness and subjectivity. This happened before when the Breakfast with Monica story was published. I was so apprehensive of the reception it did not make me feel good that it was published but instead extremely anxious (even though it had a nom de plume. That was when my marriage was ending). And even though I was writing about sexuality from a woman’s perspective that grounded the sexual act in human reflection.

Even though this was my aim and intention in writing this book (Girl –Machine) now I am doing it, and writing it, I am being overcome by the same anxiety and fear.

And this is despite the good conversations on Facebook that have been triggered by my article on women artists censorship and the comments of how much we need to have women artists and mother artists making art about these very things that I am tackling in my book- female sexuality, bodies, consciousness, subjectivity and how women cope in the world we live in, I am doing all that and have had such positive response that shows this is so needed – because not many are doing this especially in Australia where art is censored silently (and self-censored).

This should make me feel like I am doing well that I am able to write about it in my book in progress. But instead I have been paralysed by inner doubts- even to the degree of today hours of agonizing over what would my ancestors (from the 18^th century!) have thought about my writing about sexuality? And seriously worrying about what their ghosts and ancestor-spirits would think and are thinking now about my writing the novel Girl Machine? (As there is now some small reference I made to them in the Dublin section). And instead thinking that I should write a “proper” book, novel - historical interweaving about them and my search to find my lost ancestry which I have now, and not bother with the little novel first person novels I have been “working on” for so long in my “inner writing” and my novels that never get published, as I have not even tried to publish them.

This whole rumination fear stopped me in my tracks yesterday, which was the day that I had planned to finish the novel and send it to the publisher. 

It is now after 5 in the morning and I have been awake all night.

The thing that made me feel a little better was reading an article that my friend Karen linked to on her blog that I saw in blog feed about kundalini bad sex experience written by a woman who writes about and lives the SM B and D lifestyle. Not that my book is about this- but what she was writing about the experiences of inner consciousness in the body was very interesting and human and made me feel more human.

This shows me, must show me that this is the value of my writing that I have been trying to do, too.

It is the difficult hard things that trouble us, that are those that we or I must tackle as by doing so what I write may have value and meaning for others, that may help them to feel more human too. Writing about sexuality with human awareness and reflection, has this power, and it is so much needed as sexuality women’s sexuality has been hijacked for the centuries of modern life, and not just women’s in objectifying men are also losing out on their chance to experience deeper meaning within them selves, and …..

on it goes.

When I research my ancestors what I see is that they loved each other, they had fulfilling happy lives as they loved each other and were loyal to each other.

And I think that in my life the modern lives in modernity we have lost that.

They had better lives then.

I know I am being negative, I am negative I can only write this and I am trying to do what? Not trying to work through it I am just off loading some negativity. Because it’s another dark night of the soul and I am alone in the cottage in the middle of the night with a head that is ringing with pressure and pain.

3/23/13 5:39 AM

A few late nights later, I am very excited to find in my internet research images of both Andrew Hastings Doyle and Sophia Isabella Doyle (nee Norris)  - my x 7 great grandfather and grandmother (political exiles, Andrew was exiled to Australia for life for his part in the Irish Uprisings around 1798, Sophia Isabella who was of Hugenot descent and, according to one story I have read related to Irish aristocracy, went with him and with their 3 young children, as a free settler and fee paying passenger). There is a photograph of Andrew that must be one of the earliest taken in Australia in the early 19^th century, and a portrait he painted of Sophia Isabella, he was an artist and printmaker, by profession.

I will publish these images in the Daily Fugue soon, writing on their story, in the further ongoing unfolding of my story of finding my motherline.

Images:

Andromeda (also known as The Slave) by Tamara de Lempicka.

Andromeda was a popular subject of 19^th century painting, represented by male artists. In the classical Greek myth Andromeda was chained to a rock on the coastline as a sacrifice to a sea monster sent by Poseidon to avenge her mother’s hubris in declaring her daughter to be more beautiful than the sea nymphs.

Tamara de Lempicka was a refugee, exile from the Russian revolution, and in her later works she also painted refugees of the German Holocaust.

*Refugee: Slaves of State by Diane Mantzaris

The work has visual references to the Andromeda myth and its representations- by Tamara de Lempicka in her Andromeda (also known as The Slave) - and is a feminist, politically aware counterpoint to the 19th century male artists' representations of the myth of Andromeda, a popular subject of 19th painting represented by male artists.

Diane Mantzaris has an émigré background.

de Lempicak-Foxhall, Baroness Kizette (1987), Phillips Charles, ed., Passion by Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka, New York: Abbeville Press, p. 77