Who’s Afraid? captures the tension between men’s anxiety of being unreasonably accused of inappropriate behavior and women’s fear of sexual harassment and assault. It is referencing the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the inherent tension between actors and audience that is part of a theater performance and in this play the volatile and complicated relationship between men and women. Furthermore, it also relates to my previous series For There She Was that explored women speaking out and Virginia Woolf’s literature.
Who’s Afraid? addresses men’s current fear of women. To capture this, Michele Landel started with the gaze. Specifically the ‘male gaze’ as defined by the feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey. She began with a photograph of an anonymous woman from a clothing catalogue. The photograph fits interestingly within Mulvey’s three phases of the ‘male gaze’: How men look at women, how women look at themselves, and how women look at other women. She enlarged the photograph, divided it into small rectangles, and then printed the image on antique linen bed sheets. Michele pieced the photograph back together and painted, using machine embroidery, the woman onto a second bed sheet – covering her skin, hair and clothes with thread. She cut out the woman’s eyes to make the viewer uncomfortable and scared. She is evoking ghost costumes made by cutting out eyeholes from old bed sheets and playing with the idea of spectator and specter both of which have the Latin root word ‘spect’ meaning to ‘see.’ From a distance the embroidered figure on the sheet appears three-dimensional. The woman appears to ‘see’ the viewer when in fact her gaze is empty. She is an embroidered bed sheet and yet her vacant gaze causes anxiety and feels powerful.
Depending on where the sheet is draped, the gaze and context changes. In these photographs the sheet is drapped over a fauteuil Emmanuelle to directly connect it to Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and avant-garde erotic cinema. Michele also threw the sheet over a large mysterious piece of furniture as if the house is empty and as a reference to Freud’s uncanny. The sheet glides down the stairs as if it an empty ghost and cinematic specter that is both fictional and frightening.
This artwork was incinerated by a shipping company during the 2020 COVID pandemic. The artist remade it in 2021.