Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire

Abstract

JENNIFER DOYLE'S SEX OBJECTS: ART AND THE DIALECTICS OF DESIRE, MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2006 Jennifer Doyle's Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire is never boring. For Doyle, that might not be a compliment, since from her perspective, boredom is a paradoxically generative form of inattention (Doyle 2006, xxviii). Taking on the subject of sex, or what she calls after Roland Barthes the dialectics of desire, in art and literature, Doyle sets herself the daunting task of overcoming nongenerative boredom, that feeling that we already know about sex in art: sex is everywhere in art, operating as either repressed or open secret. And yet Sex Objects counters that commonsense understanding with original insights into the relationship between art, criticism, spectatorship, gender identity, and bodily practices. In this enthralling study of nineteenth-to-twentieth-century literary, visual, and performance art, Doyle explore[s] the everydayness of sexual subjectivity (Doyle 2006, xxi). Moving beyond simple binaries-sex is either good or bad, people are either gay or straight, art is either a mercenary or altruistic enterprise-Doyle gets at the complexity of sexuality and art-making in all its mundane, emotionally painful, humorous, and contradictory dimensions. In the process, she introduces us to lesserknown artists Tracy Emin and Vaginal Davis, while making us reconsider Herman Melville, Thomas Eakins, and Andy Warhol. In her original, engaging style, Doyle critiques the way in which art and sexuality as social practices have been framed, capturing the fluid and unpredictable life of pleasure-and its political and historical contingencies (xxi). The most fascinating parts of the book turn on Doyle's readings of Melville, Eakins, and Warhol. In discussing Moby Dick, she addresses the boring bits, those sections of the book where expounds upon sperm whaling and whale parts to a degree that nearly derails the narrative. Recasting the parts that Moby Dick readers routinely skip, Doyle asks why Melville knits his most elaborately erotic writing into the novel's most encyclopedic (5). In such passages as Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted in it, Doyle sees drawing attention to the representational bind posed by pornography (Doyle 2006, 4). Description and desire meld into each other, as the description of pornography becomes pornographic. Moby Dick collapses the distinction between the body and the book, highlighting the text's erotic materiality and demonstrating that sexual exchange is always mediated, in this instance by the textual. In a skillful reading of Thomas Eakins's 1873 painting The Gross Clinic, Doyle complicates the artist's reputation as the manly founder of realism. Contending that critics have ignored the homoeroticism of his work and the sexual politics of his artistic circle, she shows how Eakins's work and his pedagogical practices defied gender binaries and the transparency of realism itself. A renegade figure who tried to distance the art classroom from its social proximity to prostitution, Eakins insisted that both women and men could and should pose nude for artists and work from nude models without fear of endangering their sexual reputations, their gender identities, or the purity of their art. This uncoupling of women's bodies from their procreative function and Eakins's upending of studio culture expose[d] the economic and sexual relationships that had long underpinned [it], leaving him vulnerable to accusations of sodomy (Doyle 2006, 25). …

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