In Carol Duncan’s essay The MoMA’s Hot Mamas she explores the inequalities of gender difference and addresses how sexualised images of the female body are creating a masculinized environment for the museum and argues female bodies are acting as “artefacts of rule,” artefacts that inadvertently confirm the superiority of men over women.
Duncan’s exploration of the nude is the feature of her argument that I wish to draw upon for comparison with daily encounters of the image of the nude in contemporary forms of visual culture. She argues that in the MoMA the place of the female nude is one of a sexualised art object. Discussing how the images of women ones that are considered to be at the bottom of the social scale or are not identifiable with “no identity beyond their female anatomy.” She argues that the women “are seen primarily as sexually accessible bodies” in modern art. This leads Duncan to draw on the analogous link between painting and pornography in De Kooning’s Woman I , with De Kooning’s figure being “a knee movement away from open-thighed display of the vagina, the self-exposing gesture of mainstream pornography.” Kooning manages to refer to pornography without being explicit, which draws the question where is the line between art and pornography?
By presenting the female nude in a sexualized way the visual image becomes a key part of awareness of the inequalities of gender. It is a direct appeal to the male viewer. American Apparel is a company that became renowned for its use of sexualized images of females in its advertising. Its controversial ads play on the notions of the nude for the privilege and inequality of the male gaze much like, as Duncan argued, the MoMA. You could argue that that raw images of women in the American Apparel adverts are also “artefacts of rule” as the sexualisation and voyeuristic nature of the advertisements again present women as “accessible bodies.” Much like Duncan’s worry on de Kooning’s work, these AA images of women seemingly cross over into soft pornographic images, commoditizing the female’s sexuality.