File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_2004/french-feminism.0403, message 9


Subject: [FRENCH-FEMINISM]: Exhibition: The Sphinx Will Devour You - Istanbul
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 06:13:35 -0800
From: "Poxon, J" <poxon-AT-saclink.csus.edu>


Hi, all. I'm posting this for Tina. Please reply to her if you want more info.

Thanks.

Judith 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From:	Tina La Porta [mailto:laporta.interport-AT-rcn.com]

The Sphinx Will Devour You

http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/news/261616.asp?cp1=1

Yesim Agaoglu / Özgül Arslan / Elif Çelebi Alla Georgieva (Sofia) / 
Gül Ilgaz / Cemile Kaptan / Amal Kenawy (Cairo) / Nadezda Oleg 
Lyahova (Sofia) / Fakhriyya Mammadova (Baku) / Neriman Polat /
Tina La Porta (New York) / Ani Setyan / Sermin Sherif / Gonca Sezer / 
Kumi Yamashita (Tokio)

Curator Beral Madra

Karsi Sanat Galerisi Istanbul Turkey
15 March - 7 April 2004


A sphinx is half woman-half lion with breasts and wings. When we look 
up the definition of sphinx, it means "to strangle, guard; gatekeeper 
or protect". Paradoxal terms unified in one image!

The sphinx is a grecian myth and since ages, is a major part of 
masonry which is a male secret society.

According to the greeks, the sphinx was a guardian of the city of 
Thebes. She sat on a cliff infront of the gates leading to the city. 
Anyone that wanted to enter Thebes had to first confront the sphinx. 
The sphinx would ask one simple riddle and if the person didn't know 
the answer, she would devour him, tearing him to pieces. The king, 
Creon, was troubled that many people were unable to enter his city. 
He consulted Oedipus and offered his crown and his daughter if he 
could kill the sphinx. So he confronted the sphinx who asked him the 
riddle, "What has one voice, and goes on four feet on two feet and on 
three, but the more feet it goes on the weaker it be?" Oedipus 
responded, "Man -- who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on 
two as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age." After answering 
the riddle correctly, the sphinx committed suicide, jumping off the 
cliff and Oedipus was claimed king of Thebes.

Symbolically, the body signifies the animal nature which exists in 
women in the form of the lion which is the royalty and power of the 
divine spirit that has been myth logically attributed to women as 
mother goddess. The riddle represents the knowledge and intelligence 
inherent in women. Metaphorically speaking, the sphinx coveys its 
knowledge and intelligence to men by destroying its lower animal 
nature and bestows him the refinement of the thought process that 
leads to the spiritual evolution of man. By solving the riddle, 
Oedipus (the man) became master problem-solver.

The Sphinx is one of the most striking monuments of the ancient 
Egyptians, and has attracted the attention of travellers, scientists, 
archaeologists and others for generations. The Sphinx had a 
philosophical impact on the ancient world, on Arab writers, on 
Renaissance travellers, on the pioneers of Egyptology and on modern 
scholarship and theory.

This episode in Oedipus's mythology is the turning point in Oedipus's 
fate which lead him to kill his father and sleep with his mother. 
Freud describes the source of this complex in his Introductory 
Lectures (Twenty-First Lecture): "You all know the Greek legend of 
King Oedipus, who was destined by fate to kill his father and take 
his mother to wife, who did everything possible to escape the 
oracle's decree and punished himself by blinding when he learned that 
he had none the less unwittingly committed both these crimes." To 
explain the early psycho-drama of your childhood, Freud turned to a 
dramatic work, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus attempts to 
escape his fate. However in the process, where the confrontation with 
the sphinx is the key event, he unintentionally does the very things 
he was attempting to avoid. Freud therefore invented the term Oedipus 
Complex.

Lacan - the successor of Freud - has developed his Mirror Stage on 
the oedipus Complex. Within his famous theories "the women does not 
exist " fits in to the context of the title "the sphinx will devour 
you". Slavoj Jijek says in his interpretation of this theory: 
"Existence" is a very linguistic term, it means things which can be 
referred to, this is the opposite of Lacan's concept of "the real", 
which is the unspeakable. So, what exists is only what linguistically 
gets "represented", or, more accurately, referenced. If it isn't 
mentioned, or cant be mentioned, it doesn't exist. Likewise, 
enjoyment is necessarily dumb. So, "the woman" cannot exist in 
language. Why? Well, Lacan is trying to simply describe a situation 
neutrally, and he describes a patriarchy dominated world where women 
don't get into language, thus do not exist".

We know that in non-democratic, semi-democratic as well as democratic 
societies the gender ideologies and relations are based into two 
clear-cut groups, women and men, where in most societies men 
absolutely dominate the women, giving no room for choice, difference 
and resistance. Judith Butler's preference of transformation of 
historical and anthropological positions that understand gender as a 
relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts' 
has not happened yet. Quoting her words, there are still fixed 
attributes in a person, gender is not yet a fluid variable which 
shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times.

One of the most hegemonic fields within this context is the media, 
which disseminates alternative images and places the women to the 
center of the war of symbols as the defeated subject. We"are in the 
age of the electronic media,as signifier of the male gaze and ego.

Butler showed that "gender is not just a social construct, but rather 
a kind of performance, a show we put on, a set of signs we wear, as 
costume or disguise". Within the neocapitalist "lifestyle" discourse 
the performance/show of women is a substance for pure commodity.

She indicated that in Western discourse, "woman" is always the other 
of "man", hence excluded from culture or the Symbolic and in feminist 
theory, "woman" is universal category, which thus excludes 
differences of race, class, or sexuality. In fundamentalist Islamic 
societies, the woman is not even "the other", she is the simple tool 
of ideology. Accordingly, the feminist theory in non- and 
semi-democratic countries became an extension of male dominated state 
policy. This leaves the majority of the society no way but to think 
about women as fragmentations and disjointed subjects.

As to the riddle, with its classification of childhood, youth and old 
age, it also represents the fate of human hood shifting from 
dependence (crawling) to independence (walking) and back to dependent 
status (walking with a cane) it really relates us to the main 
conflict in neoliberal capitalism today. In our societies there are 
those who produce and those who do not or cannot. The ones who 
produce are rewarded with a welfare life and the rest are left to 
poverty and deprivation; among these children and women are the ones 
who most of the time suffer.

In the age of electronic images we are predisposed to perceive and 
face the world in fictions and fictional representations. We are 
obliged to identify "the self" in images. Art in its resistant forms 
seems to be the only juxtaposition to the media, electronic images 
and male hegemony. The people are also contented with the 
representations in paintings and other forms of art, where they can 
see definite significations and cohesive subjects - even if the 
representations reflect the uncanny, the abject, the transgressive. 
In our struggle for coherence art forms help us to imagine the 
undivided subject. The art became a realm in which we are reassured 
that there are integrated subjects within this world.






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