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Divine Bodies:
Tea Mäkipää’s “Sexgod”
Annamari Vänskä
“I find Tea‘s
works monumental, megalomaniacal, and fearless. She works objectively
as if she were a researcher.” Pirjetta Brander on her colleague‘s
work
Tea Mäkipää‘s installation
Sexgod (2003) consists of a room with two naked middle-aged women,
one black, one white, lying on light tables. The room is filled
with sounds, the aural inner landscape of the human body. Both women
in Mäkipää‘s work are mothers – they have
already once relinquished their bodies to others by giving birth.
This time around their bodies are appropriated by art, which is
serving up the naked bodies for all visitors to see.
Mäkipää‘s work asks
by which right art, as one area of visual culture, has offered and
continues to offer the female body as an object for voyeuristic
-pleasure-seeking and a prey for the consuming gaze. This installation
also raises questions about age: in our nudity-peddling culture
only the youthful (women) are allowed to display their unwrinkled
bodies, whereas the middle-aged (womanÕs) body is considered taboo,
ugly, and repulsive.
Tea Mäkipää‘s installation
raises questions about how visual culture – from fashion magazines
and advertisements to art – mingles looking, beauty, and desirability
in order to produce notions and conceptions of ideal femininity,
to be voyeuristically consumed by others, including women themselves.
In feminist thinking, it is common to argue that in Western culture,
images featuring women support, presume, and participate in the
construction of femininity and ideal womanliness. This means that
images operate as a social institution alongside the family, school,
church, and other media in producing a concept of ideal femininity,
i.e. teaching us which kind of femininity is desirable or undesirable.
In her installation Sexgod, Tea Mäkipää
tackles this issue. She uses art as a critical tool in order to
question the literal consumption of women in the most typical way
of viewing art – pleasure-driven voyeurism. By installing naked,
living, middle-aged women on a podium, Mäkipää problematises
the structures of the voyeuristic gaze – no doubt these women
are available to the pleasure-seeking eye but, at the same time,
they are also able to return the gaze, to look back. Sexgod illuminates
those mechanisms of power and viewing, which define the norms of
the “ideal” and “beautiful” modern woman. In
returning the gaze, the exposed women make the voyeur the object
of their gaze. In this sense, Sexgod can be seen as the proposition
that art is simultaneously a social technique in the construction/deconstruction
of representations of women and femininity, and a device for looking
and being looked at.
Annamari
Vänskä is a freelance journalist and curator and a visual
culture researcher at the University of Helsinki.
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