Dear Reader,
I invite you to visit my studio and participate in the creation of my new body of work, Hysteria (2023), as a fly on the wall.
I thought Hysteria would be a fitting title, as you will soon see, for this new body of work which I will be undertaking in collaboration with a number of interesting people. Other than being celebrated artists, of some form or another, I find it hard to group them besides saying they only have the common experience of not being male.
Hysteria was the name of a curious illness, persisting from ancient times until 1980, thought only to affect those with a uterus. While the exact cause of hysteria was never pinned down, the symptoms were thought to encompass a wonderfully wide range of irritating or disquieting female behaviours and maladies, from light-headedness to strongly worded opinions.
I myself felt the dreaded pangs of hysteria when I first encountered Klimt’s painting Danaë (1907). In Danaë, Klimt took as his subject one of a number of Greek myths where the king of the gods rapes a woman. On this occasion Zeus impregnated a sleeping woman named Danaë, in the guise of gold dust. Danaë was locked away in a tower at the time by her abusive father. Klimt, like many artists before, transformed this ancient tale of rape into an erotic symbol of divine love and inspiration. Naturally.
It inspired me. As a result of my temporary bout of hysteria, I began a self-portrait in 2019 which reworked Klimt’s composition. I reimaged myself as Danaë, and sought to transform her from the nude laid out for the viewer’s gaze, into an active participant in her representation. Her eyes, which were closed in Klimt’s painting, open to gaze back at you.
This painting planted the idea for my new body of work, Hysteria, as I reflected, with intense frustration, on the dominance of the male gaze in the current painted canon of art history. Anyone that is ‘other’ has, for the most part, held the position of the muse within the confines of painting.
These ‘others’ are chosen by the male gaze for the male gaze, at the service of genius – from Dali’s painted specimens, segmented and pinned to his canvas like human butterflies, to Picasso, who, in the words of his granddaughter Marina, crushed them to his canvas before inevitably disposing of them. Or, they are Gauguin’s famously pubescent muses, turned wives, immortalised under a Tahitian sun in a lost paradise of the artist’s mind, frozen in youth as paragons of purity or beauty or temptation or femininity or mystery.
Thankfully, my Danaë will be the only self-portrait in this venture. I will be collaborating with those interesting subjects, hinted at earlier, reader, to rework other canonical paintings by male artists through a contemporary lens and the female gaze. Together, we will be reimagining the female muse with agency by ‘standing in her shoes’ within the painting’s reality, tweaking the old references within these iconic paintings to reflect the perspective of the new contemporary subjects. We will remake the muses as fully fleshed-out, multifaceted representations with their own voice.
My intention in Hysteria is simply to advocate for and explore perspectives overlooked in the current canon of art history, by re-examining and reworking famous depictions of women.
Yours truly,
Natasha Walsh
