Armitage pudens?

[Another apology: My discipline teaches one to structure arguments by thinking for a long time about evidence, formulating a general thesis, and then offering examples to support it. This strategy is great for persuasion but it slows down any writer who is not entirely convinced by the big argument she’s formulating or doesn’t have all the pieces together. It also has a tendency to obscure or obliterate conflicting evidence. I’ve written some big building blocks of arguments here in the past, for example, on my position as reader, or on Armitage equilibrium, but on these issues — objectification and “why Armitage?”– I am going to take the opposite approach and offer fragments before formulating anything general, if I ever do so. I’m making this decision because of the extreme (intellectual, physical) discomfort I felt looking at pictures of Mr. Armitage that appeared this week in conjunction with the Strike Back publicity. I’m too conflicted to write something general at the moment, so I am going to work on this issue in pieces. Also I don’t want to discard the possibility that my position will change as I talk with you all about it, so formulating a big statement that I just have to redact seems silly. I’ve written before to say, essentially, “don’t objectify,” but I want to explore the dynamics that feed into my desire to and my horror of doing so myself. And ironically, in order to do that I am going to have to objectify Mr. Armitage, in the same ways that I have been doing since I started writing this blog.]

The big question here could be: “why do we find Armitage beautiful?”

One way to get at the question of beauty is to treat it as a phenomenon subject to tropological representations. Art historians of the Western tradition are well-versed in the visual topoi or representative conventions of Western imagery. Topoi play an important role in making the meaning of such representations; they provide clues that enhance our comprehension of the images we see. An example that many are familiar with are the visual conventions in the representations of the saints in Roman Catholic religious art, especially before modernity: St. Peter always has a key, for example, and St. Bartholomew is always displaying his flayed-off skin. One of the things that artists do to be “original” without abandoning the comprehensibility of their product is to play with these conventions. An “original” piece of work in the West thus typically involves a novel (or at least surprising) employment of familiar topoi. Our response to these employments is also related to our experience of the topoi in a range of settings. If you’re interested in how such devices work in television, you should look at this fantastic site, which a friend introduced me to recently. They use the similar term “tropes,” which is usually applied to literary works, defined as “storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in audience members’ minds and expectations.” Hence, the original is never really original; we judge the beautiful always in light of conventions of beauty that we’ve participated in before.

A familiar representative convention of beauty in the West is the figural pose of the Venus pudica (“modest Venus”). Although this representative convention goes back at least as far as the Greeks, who used it for Aphrodite (the Roman Capitoline Venus, like so many things Roman, is a derivative work), the example with which most of us are familiar — studying it was how I learned the term — is the famous Botticelli Venus:

Sandro Botticelli, “La nascita de Venere” (c. 1486), tempera on canvas, housed in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Venus pudica is a representation of beauty in which the beautiful object exposes most of her body to the gaze of the viewer, nonetheless concealing some aspects of it with her hands, usually the breasts and genitals. Note that commentators on this particular example of the convention note that the work does not seek to arouse lust in the viewer. When I was in college (we read Helen Gardner’s Art through the Ages, 8th ed., and I still regularly refer to this text when writing lectures, it’s very reliable and readable) Botticelli’s Venus was understood as a neo-Platonic allegory, with the dissonant sign of the seashell as a frequent representative device for the vulva; variant readings nowadays suggest that the allegorical program has more to do with recommended behavior in marital relationships. Nonetheless, the Venus pudica trope usually has the effect of drawing the eyes to the concealed bits — one source makes this tendency an effect of the unavoidable asymmetricality of the pose — thus at least gesturing to the concealment / revelation dynamic of pornographic visual conventions. Interestingly, that same source claims that this pose is not applicable to the male form, one supposes because Western notions of modesty do not require the concealment of the male breast.

I’ve been hinting here and there that I find my reaction to some of the Strike Back publicity embarrassing. This morning, in response to the new photos I mentioned previously, I figured out one dynamic that feeds into this response. That is, I think that some of these pictures show Mr. Armitage as Venus pudens (I choose the present progressive here intentionally), and they thus seek to move us by means of our cultural reactions to this particular trope of modesty. To wit:

Photographs of Richard Armitage by David Venni that appeared on the Internet recently, date uncertain, but probably after October, 2009. Source: Русскоязычный Cайт Pичардa Армитиджa

The figure in these photos places both hands in front of the (covered) genitals, apparently to balance his posture on the stool. That signal of instability draws us in — makes us think that in a frame in which parts of the structure are in play, we might catch something as viewers that we wouldn’t otherwise see. So we look closely. Next, the contours of the body are heavily shielded by a very dark suit, so visual attention is focused on the light parts of the picture: the face, the shirt, the hands. So it’s precisely the whiteness of the hands that draws the viewer’s attention to the shielding of the hips. The whiteness of the face against the dark suit draws our attention as well, but the figure shields his gaze (as opposed to his breast) from the viewer. If we read this pose in light of the Venus pudens trope (the verb form emphasizes the performance of the trope — not modest Venus, but Venus being modest), we can conclude that much of what is being performed here is modesty. Whatever it is, it’s sweet. In my mode of projecting overempathy on my subjects, I even have a tendency to read it as embarrassment. In the first photo to the left, above, the modesty comes from the inclined, contemplative, apparently measured, gaze of the figure, and in the second, it’s amplified by the impression that the figure is lost in his thoughts or laughing at his own secret joke or pleasurable memory. Whatever it is, as viewers, we can’t see it, and that’s precisely what draws us into the picture: clues suggest that we should be able to see things that the picture ultimately denies us.

Emphasizing that I have no evidence about the sequence in which these photos were taken (the position of the camera in relationship to the subject suggests that the first above and the one on the right here (–>) stand in closer chronological relationship to each other than the second above), nonetheless, I am inclined to read the one on the right as the last one. We always look for the eyes to diagnose the genuine smile, and the musculature of Mr. Armitage’s face tends to pull the tip of his nose down as well when he appears to be “really” smiling. I’d argue that to the extent that the smile seems genuine, it’s because there’s a tiny little tinge of embarrassment about it. Pudendus means not only genitals, but also shame.

To conclude, for now:

A. Thinking of these photos through the framework of the Venus pudica topos makes evident something I’ve noted elsewhere as part of a really interesting discussion started by Skully and RAFrenzy. I speculate that Mr. Armitage draws such a peculiar reaction from his fans due to the “can almost touch but not quite” dynamic evident in some of his oeuvre, especially North and South,  and in his interactions with the press. We want to relate to the subject but are not quite able to, a tension that seems evident in my reading of these pictures. Venus pudica / Venus pudens draws us in by making us think we will be offered a glimpse of something that is actually denied to us. That’s what makes them like crack for me. And I am seriously uncomfortable with that reaction — not only the fact of it occurring in response to someone whom I will only ever experience via visual media, but the intensity with which it hits when something new about Mr. Armitage pops up. Inter alia, some of which I will not mention here for reasons of discretion: my face flushes, my heart beats faster, my stomach becomes queasy, a broad grin bursts out on my face. If this is the uncontrollable physiological reaction that men have when suddenly glimpsing a woman they find attractive, I want to sympathize more with them than I ever have in the past. Don’t understand me as a gender essentialist: I don’t want to say that only men experience such sudden visual reactions. I certainly have had physiological reactions to attractive men in the past. But only to men I knew. I have only ever had a reaction of similar intensity to this one when viewing men with whom I have been emotionally, intellectually, and/or physically intimate — and I am willing to accept it on those terms because it makes sense. This instance bothers the heck out of me, because it does not. Mr. Armitage is really just a picture for me. So a next step in this discussion for me probably needs to be “how does Armitage succeed in creating a relationship of intimacy with the viewer?” And in this case, one must add, even when he’s not speaking.

B. Assuming the gaze is what the female viewer wishes to see in the case of Armitage — or any other man — Armitage’s frequent use of the repositioning of his head to reveal his gaze after it’s been turned away or somehow concealed must be a key weapon in his acting arsenal. It enhances his employment of microexpressions, many of which are vested in the eyes. Repeatedly in North & South, for example, we see his gaze concealed and then revealed. Even if we can only assume what he’s thinking, it’s the revelation that’s key. Ditto for the bowed head and the sudden stare from under the eyebrows. The fact that he is able to open his eyes wide enough to make sure that we see the whites under the pupils enhances this effect as it makes the stare more piercing. It explains why Guy has to have such long bangs but also the eyeshadow — it enhances Armitage’s ability to conceal and reveal what we most wish to see.

C. I was always puzzled in art history when I was instructed that Venus pudica was erotic. After this example I understand that the eroticism lies not in the concealment of the genitals per se, but the genitals as an aspect of the thing the (male) viewer wishes to see but cannot — the point of the trope is its particular performance of concealment and hint at revelation that becomes impossible, not the genitals or the breast(s), i.e., what is concealed. Performances (or apparent performances, as above) of concealment heighten the effect.

~ by Servetus on May 2, 2010.