The spectatorial position I have outlined is perhaps an unenviable one. The spectator whose feelings I describe suffers a number of embarrassments; she is daunted and unsure of her cultural competence. In her bringing of real life to the frame of art she is exposed by her antipathy for displays of sexuality, or
sentimentality, sometimes unfortunately both. She is baffled by the lack of clear meaning, wondering if G&G is an in joke that she is not ‘in’ on. Exposed as female, she is without the frame, looking in at exclusively male world, and ‘without’; excluded from male pleasures (but yet the cause of their anxieties). She is not ‘liked’. And she is always disadvantaged, on the back foot, always on the wrong side of the reason/emotion divide, excessive, and vulnerable to the bruising of the punctum.
Rancière offers the spectator emancipation; and perhaps this may include freedom from embarrassment.69 Rancière’s spectator originates in, but is not confined to the auditorium of a theatre; she may be at the cinema, at an exhibition, or alone on the sofa watching television. Spectatorship, in theatrical terms, has been considered problematic and in need of emancipation because it puts the viewer in a
compromised position, one in which the capacities to know and to act are restricted. The first problem is that viewing is posited as the opposite of knowing. The second is that viewing is the opposite of acting, that it is a passive state. Two principal solutions proposed in the realm of theatre relate to distance; firstly that the spectator
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114 should maintain distance, observe, evaluate and calculate in a ‘distanced
investigation’. The alternative is to collapse distance, to abandon the position of a neutral observer in exchange for ‘vital participation’.70
Rancière takes a more radical approach questioning the assumption of the
hierarchical pairings of terms as essential opposites. He argues instead that terms such as ‘viewing’ and ‘knowing’, ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’, and even ‘activity’ and
‘passivity’ are not logical oppositions but terms describing the ‘distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities’. Whilst the terms lie within frameworks of inequality, emancipation becomes possible when the spectator understands that ‘viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions.’71 However, in Rancière’s challenge to the opposition of activity and passivity, he still privileges the capacities and meaning of ‘activity’. He argues in fact, that viewing is already active, that we do it all the time, and that it is ‘normal’.72
Rather than following Rancière in seeking to reframe the spectatorial position as one of strength, of certainty, and of action, or even of normality, I suggest instead a reconsideration of the values that pertain to the minor affective register of doubt and passivity, indeed of embarrassment itself. This must not be a reversal of values but what Edelman calls a ‘queer oppositionality’, one that ‘opposes the logic of
opposition’.73 Strength, certainty and action that are the ‘opposite’ of
embarrassment draw their credentials from a phallocentric system, which as Bersani says must preserve the ‘denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and
70
Referring particularly to the work of Brecht and Artaud, Rancière discusses two theatrical solutions to the ‘problem of the spectator’. pp4,5.
71
Ranciere. pp12,13.
72 Ibid. ‘Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into
activity. It is our normal situation.’ p17.
73
115 women. I don’t mean the value of gentleness, or nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but rather of a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self.’74 My contention is that there is in art and particularly in the art of Gilbert & George, a capacity to engender a minor instance of just such a ‘radical disintegration and humiliation’ of the self, and that spectatorial embarrassment is symptomatic of that capacity.75 The undervalued feeling of spectatorial embarrassment, of being in a doubtful space, of being blocked, restricted, queered or sticky manifests as a lack of coherence, a coming apart and a going to pieces. I believe that whilst being hard to ascribe any value to this in conventional terms, it holds out some sort of promise.
Gilbert & George deliberately deny the viewer any degree of certainty, or comfort, or even cover; we are exposed. In the moment of embarrassment, when we know that we have failed to present a ‘coherent self’, I suggest that there is an opportunity (if only . . . ) to consider what other categories of self might have been possible, might be possible next time. Despite Rancière’s proposed emancipation of the spectator, I am still (and willingly) embarrassed by Gilbert & George, or more accurately, by my spectatorial response. I am still embarrassed by the subject matter that matters to me, by my failure to maintain a critical distance, and how this results in exposing too much of myself. Leaving the Gilbert & George exhibition, and mindful of Fanny, I am careful where I tread. Fanny, you may say, got her comeuppance. As she quit the scene of peeping through the hole in the wall, and flustered by all that she had seen, in her agitation she tripped and fell, face down, arse up. This might be a compromising position, but alternatively, I prefer to see it as another failure of intellect to rise above emotion.
74
Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?," in Reclaiming Sodom, ed. Jonathan Goldberg(New York: Routledge, 1994). pp256,257.
75
Bersani describes art as an attempt to replicate the disintegration of self that can be achieved by sexuality and sexuality as itself an earlier attempt to replicate the disintegration of self of an original and psychologically determined pleasure/unpleasure. Leo Bersani, The
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