Your Thoughts about Orientalism

[Tom Edgerton]

Thanks, everyone, for your contributions so far. I think this is an interesting and important topic.

It's hard for me to accept that "to paint one, you have to be one." I thinks it's a legitimate thing for an artist to record their reactions and impressions of another culture. Sharon's right, it has to be done with some intellect and sensitivity driving it, but to say that I can't paint cowboys because I'm not one is pretty hard for me to swallow. I don't, but I'd like to be able to if I chose, without being accused of cultural theft. As always, the art is a record of an interaction with the subject, not a literal depiction of the subject--even in photography. So it's as much about the artist as the subject.

One of my favorite painters is JW Waterhouse. He obviously wasn't there for the historic and allegorical events that he depicted, so if the above litmus test were to be applied, a lot of very good paintings would not have been painted. But I also think my appreciation of him stems from my looking past the content to the technique. A lot of the pre-Raphaelite and Victorian schmaltz makes my skin crawl--it's just that with Waterhouse, it's not so over the top, as with some of his contemporaries like Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau (please, let's don't go there again), and Rosetti.

We all agree that sexism, racism and cultural exploitation are bad. But to discern another artist's motives and intent is very hard to do, and what should be an obvious discussion becomes immediately very nuanced and fuzzy.

Sharon and I may never agree about a particular artist in this regard, but she's raised some very compelling and important points, maybe the most important being that, once in a while, it's a good idea to question one's own motives and point of view when portraying a given theme.

But upon further reflection, even this is not easy and clear cut. A case in point would be Burt Silverman's paintings of female exotic dancers--a theme he has revisited off and on throughout his career. The paintings have been castigated by some as exploitive because of their straightforward, unromanticized point of view. But his explanation of their evolution has been that he has been working out his own reaction to the women and how they collide with both his private inner world and our overall cultural attitudes about sex. Mr. Silverman would be the first to admit that he's not entirely clear and never has been about the pull this subject has for him. Doesn't an artist need to have the latitude to work without necessarily understanding exactly what his or her motives are--thus the art becomes the mechanism for "working things out?"

But to complicate the discussion further, at times some of the Silverman "Dancer" paintings have been subsequently sold, so the use to which they have been put has changed based on the needs of the artist at the moment. Does this make them exploitive?

Anyone?