Naked Defiance

Photomontages are subversive by nature. They’re counterfactuals—pictures cut up and rearranged to show things as they are not, things as they might be, pictures that pose an anxious question beloved by fantasists, moralists and revolutionaries: What if? Objects and bodies are turned on their heads, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. Think of the German dadaist Hannah Höch’s 1929 photomontage Fremde Schönheit (Strange Beauty). Onto a photograph of a reclining nude white female body, Höch planted an oversized image of a carved stone head, along with a pair of eyeglasses and eyes that are, in turn, too large for the head. The nude, familiar to Western eyes, thus has become a jarring hybrid. It’s clearly subversive, but what exactly is subverted?

Keep this question in mind as we look at a photomontage with an unusual PLAYBOY history: the artwork displayed above. Created by Martha Rosler in the early 1970s, the piece is a subtle and comical work. Rosler, known for her socially biting photography, video and performance pieces, never titled this work, but it now goes by the laughably long name Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Hot House, or Harem (After Ingres). Snipped from the pages of PLAYBOY, these wholesome-looking young women lounge about together wearing nothing, forming a landscape of “alluring mounds of flesh,” as Rosler has said. The women in this topography are white, mostly, and topless, all, coyly obscuring their privates in various ways, often while smiling and making eye contact.

These nudes were not always on the same page. They began their public lives separately, representatives in PLAYBOY magazines of a certain American ideal of beauty from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s—Connie Kreski, Kathy MacDonald, DeDe Lind and dozens of other models. Some years after publication, when the images had mostly finished out their lives in bathrooms, bedrooms and basements, they found themselves bound up with string and tossed into the garbage. And there they unwittingly began a new existence as part of the feminist revolution.

In the trash heaps of her New York City apartment building and the town dumps of southern California, Rosler found and rescued these photos from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. What she really dug about these sexpots was what she saw as their “just past” beauty, as she explains in an e-mail. She loved that they occupied “the twilight realm” between being desired and being rejected. By the time she discovered and recovered them, the nudes had been dumped for younger, more contemporary beauties as PLAYBOY’s primary aesthetic moved from “corn-fed” gals modestly revealing themselves to raunchier, more exposed poses. (The first Centerfold to go full frontal was in January 1972.)

Liberating the semi-nudes from their pages, Rosler rearranged them en masse on a new page for a new life. Like other Rosler photomontages of the early 1970s that juxtapose mismatched images to make a social point (in one work, for instance, a woman calmly vacuums her curtains while outside her window a scene from the Vietnam war unfolds), Hot House was clearly subversive. But to get back to our opening question, what does it subvert?

As I see it, in Rosler’s hands the Hot House panorama of bodies evokes not so much the cozy seductions of PLAYBOY itself but something vaguely threatening. As Richard Meyer, an art history professor at Stanford University, notes in “Feminist Art Re-Covered” (his chapter in 2019’s A Companion to Feminist Art), the PLAYBOY figures in Rosler’s collage “overproduce female submission to the point where it becomes something like its opposite—a wave of naked defiance”—and also, possibly a picture of female pleasure. That seems to be roughly how Rosler sees this work today too.

“Almost all the women in my photomontage are lying down, in postures of allure or surrender,” Rosler says. But as part of a harem, she notes, “they arguably constitute a woman’s domain, a ‘heterotopia’ carved out at least temporarily from the domination of the master.” They’re rebellious servants, free and unafraid. Seen this way, the photomontage begins to look like a horizontal riff on Pablo Picasso’s famously challenging early cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which features five female nudes aggressively standing and staring down the viewer. Even the colors are similar.

Throughout the 1970s Rosler kept Hot House in her home, only bringing it out as a slide for an occasional lecture. Two decades later, though, her collages began to enter the art market. As Meyer notes, copies of her pieces were no longer “rough-and-tumble paste-ups or agitprop flyers” but rather “editioned photographs (which is to say, commodities).” It was at this point that Rosler’s PLAYBOY photocollage acquired its long name.

Then in 2007 the world was hit upside the head with WACK!, a groundbreaking exhibition of 119 feminist artists. Organized by curator Cornelia Butler, the show opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and included plenty of provocative works, including Hot House and 30 other Rosler photomontages.

But the big news—and, for some, the big outrage—was the exhibition catalogue’s cover design, which features a large detail of Rosler’s collage and the words WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution splayed in white, all-caps letters across the mounds of flesh. The meaning of the Hot House nudes began to change anew.

Some artists were angry, some puzzled, some tickled. Some viewers worried that the cover seemed to sanction a particular kind of feminism: the branch that has become derogatorily known as “do-me” feminism. Others thought the cover suggested, inaccurately, that the WACK! exhibition focused only on women and their bodies, women as sexual objects and women as sexual beings. Still others complained about the cover’s “peep show” aspect. New York Times critic Holland Cotter called it “just another sex-sells pitch.” Never mind that Rosler’s work has always been considered revolutionary, sharply critical of the commodification of women’s bodies. Those same bodies—the nudes that had been made for PLAYBOY—had once again become hot commodities.

The reaction didn’t surprise Rosler. In fact, she remembers warning the catalogue’s designer that the cover would trigger a response. But Butler and the WACK! team stood firm behind their decision to feature the PLAYBOY nudes. (By the way, the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation happened to be one of several big donors to the exhibit.) Rosler believes the curatorial team’s insistence on using her PLAYBOY work was largely based on their conviction that a work of art “made up of a very large number of women, mostly looking at us without shame, is inherently ambiguous. It’s ‘playful!’ and perhaps pleasurable—for women.” In other words, there’s safety in ambiguity. Well, maybe.

After WACK!’s L.A. opening, several of the exhibition artists went out for dinner, including Mary Beth Edelson, perhaps best known for her 1972 collage Some Living American Women Artists, which was included in WACK! In that collage, all the bodies at the table in Da Vinci’s Last Supper are topped with the heads of female artists (for instance, Georgia O’Keeffe’s head appears on Jesus’s body).

“We were all euphoric over the exhibition,” said Edelson, recalling the night of the WACK! opening in a Clocktower interview with Butler. “Of course the big discussion was the cover.… I mean, some of the women were very polarized about it, just thought it was awful.” Others, including Edelson herself, thought it was pretty gutsy. As the evening wore on, someone suggested that Edelson do to the WACK! cover what she’d done to The Last Supper: paste the faces of feminist artists onto the bodies.

“We just all shrieked with joy,” Edelson said.

Then Edelson went to work, gluing cutouts of dozens of feminist artists’ faces atop the models’ nude bodies. A prominent position was given to Rosler, whose head is planted on the body of September 1967 Playmate Angela Dorian, right above the catalogue’s title.

What kind of subversion is Edelson’s radical redo? Is it an act of outrage, sisterhood or something else? Butler, WACK!’s curator, tells me by e-mail that she views Edelson’s take as “a love letter to the show and everyone involved.” And, she adds, it’s also very funny. But Meyer sees it as a more ambivalent gesture, suggesting that although Edelson’s collage assembles “a community of feminist artists—and the humor and pleasure they shared,” it also signals those artists’ anger about “being erased from the cover in favor of eroticized bodies posed for male pleasure.” Unlike Rosler’s Hot House, he notes, Edelson used a “purposeful crudeness” in her cut-and-paste technique, which points to what he calls “the rather different crudeness of the [real] WACK! cover—namely the way in which it presses naked women’s bodies into the service of marketing feminist art.”

Rosler, for her part, says she finds Edelson’s “appropriation of my appropriation…clever…and humorous.” This further subversion of the PLAYBOY images, she says, “converts the unnamed young body models of the PLAYBOY endeavor into risky/frisky images of well-known older women artists…replacing their anonymity with Personalities.”

But wait a second—didn’t these models already have personalities? Aren’t they still personalities? Is it possible that Edelson, in obscuring their faces, has actually robbed the original models of something they’d managed to hold on to until that point—their very identities?

And now, with this article, the narrative of the nudes evolves once again: They have returned to PLAYBOY, from whence they began. Is this yet another radical gesture, and if so, what is its meaning? Well, it just isn’t clear. And that’s how it has always been. Even now, Rosler says she isn’t sure exactly what she had in mind some 48 years ago when she assembled her PLAYBOY nudes. The cutting and positioning of the figures she recalls clearly, but, she says, “I simply have no idea when I thought of doing this photomontage, how long it took me to do it, or why.”

So we’re back where we started, with the same uneasy question: Why this subversion? What do we gain that wasn’t there before in the PLAYBOY nudes? There’s no obvious answer, but what jumps out is that after nearly 50 years, after all the cutting and pasting, effacement and rearrangement, one thing remains in its startling quiddity: the bodies themselves, just as fresh, or rather just as “just past” fresh, as they ever were.