Look,

See: Maia Hortas Little Acts of Voyeurism

Maia Horta posts selfies on Facebook. Theres nothing unusual about that, except for the
fact that in her selfies, Maia doesnt project her best (most photogenic) face; does not
perform the most glamorous, popular self that is so often implicit in the trope of the
selfie. Rather, we see an array of invented personas that, whether photographed or
painted, are charged with painterly conventions. But equally striking is the fact that in Maias
staging of self, facial hair plays a big part: beards, moustaches, lashes that rim the lips in
provocative simulacrum of vulvas. And if this were not enough to make one think of the
morphological analogies between faces and genitals, Maia often underlines that upper
orifice by stuffing something into it (banana, cigarette), or sticking something out of it
(bubble gum, tongue.) Not so much an allusion to oral sex, it is as if the whole act of coitus
were shamelessly performed upon another bodily stage.
These preoccupations with the visible markers of gender identity with the making visible of
polymorphous gender identity are rehearsed and reiterated in Maias paintings, which
concern themselves with the relationship between looking at art and looking at bodies, and
in particular, looking at naked female bodies. In this, she partakes of a powerful lineage of
feminist artists. Since the late 1960s, makers of art in this lineage have explored the
metaphors that are issued by the naked female form, and the particular evasions (from fig-
leaf, through coy hand or drapery, to depilation, literally shaving away the evidence of
messy under-parts) surrounding female genitalia. The relationship between the vagina and
disgust a relationship that is implicit in so much visual culture has always been at the
heart of these critical works.
For centuries, naked male bodies (from the Greek kouros on) tended to armour-like
containment; womens were soft, undulating, and owned this cut place that was neither
fully internal, nor entirely external, a rupture. This is how art historian Lynda Nead put it: If
the female body is defined as lacking containment and issuing filth and pollution from its
faltering outlines and broken surface, then the classical forms of art perform a kind of
magical regulation of the female body, containing it and momentarily repairing the orifices
and tears.1 Historically, with male artists as the predominant actors in the field and, until
the twentieth century, men as the presumed or idealised spectators, the female nude
became the space of regulation by culture over nature, and ways of papering over that

Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 7.

orifice revealed the overriding power of culture over nature, materialised as the mastery of
the male gaze over the female body.
Simultaneously, however, the female nude offered the ultimate titillation by providing
spectators with a glimpse of the site of prohibited viewing, a small prospect of big danger, of
which the notion of the vagina dentata was merely the hyperbole. And when such male
artists (from Courbet through Picasso and Dubuffet to de Kooning and, with greater
theoretical knowingness, Marcel Duchamp) began prising open womens legs, exposing the
concealed, bringing the inside out into the open, metaphors spilled out: for Courbet, the
cunt was nothing short of the origin of the world itself, exposing how easy the oscillation
between revilement and idealisation. It was when feminist artists, and in particular
performance artists (Shigeko Kubotas Vagina Painting of 1965, Valie Exports Genital Panic
of 1969 and Carolee Schneemans Interior Scroll of 1976) began to explore the vagina as a
site not of (Freudian) lack, but of confrontation and creativity breaking the mould that
identifies seeing and making with masculinity and being seen and posing with femininity
that the sexual politics of vision came to be more fully exposed, so to speak, and explored. It
was also no coincidence that such feminist performances prioritised touch over sight, since
historically, sight has been so burdened with male agency.
Rather than eschewing a relationship with the gaze, Maia throws herself into the arena and
explores it, explores, not least, the possible collusion of women in the binary structure of the
scopic regime: in John Bergers famous equation, men act and women appear.2 What Maias
works bring into the equation is a curiosity about Bergers formulation; a curiosity, in short,
about the relationship between such historically and ideologically freighted occlusions and
displays, and that other form of viewing, generally considered more benign: the gaze that is
enlisted in the production of art. An art that addresses itself to the eyes, and that, in some
ways like pornography, produces pleasure. Maia explores the ways in which curiosity and
pleasure are intrinsically entailed in a scopic regime that underlies not only the production
of art, but also its circuits, the passage from studio to the marketplace, from marketplace to
museum, where nicely dressed women and men peer earnestly at the strip-tease of
womens bodies.
It is perhaps no coincidence that two of her exhibitions have taken place within the small,
exposed stage of a shop window, that traditional site of display and temptation, where

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972, p. 47.

desire and consumption are played off against each other within the embracing parameters
of a capitalist economy. The artist described Art Lovers, shown at the Soapbox Gallery in
Brooklyn, New York (2012), as a voyeuristic experience of sorts. It consisted of a series of
small oil paintings hung in random grid formation within the shallow area of the gallery
window. Interspersed with portraits of female icons such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath,
were images in which the act of looking (at art) is the pictorial event that we (spectators)
watch. In each painting, a viewer seen from the back is portrayed regarding a well-known
work of art in which a female nude explicitly displays herself to the spectators gaze. As
secondary viewers, we are enlisted to witness these acts of witnessing in a motion of
identification with the viewing figures in the pictures. That these viewers are both male and
female highlights the extent to which women spectators are recruited to occupy and collude
with the position of desire traditionally associated with the (heterosexual) male spectator.
The small scale of the works, while presenting practical advantages to the artist (she
transported them to New York in a suitcase), also served to invite viewers of the exhibition
to closer examination. This invitation was, however, frustrated by the transparent pane of
the shop window through which the works were seen, teasing the viewer into a proximity
that is visual, but not tactile. In this way, the theme of the exhibition was replicated and
refracted by its form: titillation, invitation, frustration.
In these paintings of art lovers peering directly into the offering revealed by womens
parted thighs, the allusions to existing works of art multiply: so we have Gerhard Richters
Betty looking at a menstruating girl from a Pipilotti Rist photographic print; a male figure
lifted from a painting by Belgian artist Michel Borremans gazing at Duchamps tant
Donns, or another figure from Borremans, this time a woman, peeping into the cunt
displayed in a painting by Lisa Yuscavage. In Happy Wife, Happy Life (2012), a drawing by
Swedish artist Jockum Nordstrom is being looked at by a figure from a painting by his wife,
Mamma Andersson. And in Origin of the World, a female spectator resembling Maia herself
watches a video by Pipilotti Rist, which in turn references Courbets provocative Origin of the
World. Photographers at the Museum (2011) and Babes at the Museum (2011) both gently
satirise the appropriative and mimetic behaviour of museum visitors performing the act of
looking. All these small paintings are rendered in a consciously awkward, deadpan style that
references the art-historical painting academy more than it does the trendy idioms of
electronic media. Maias paintings enter into a stylistic conversation with a loose group of
painters that includes John Currin, Mamma Andersson, Marlene Dumas, Lisa Yuscavage,

Michael Borremans, artists who more or less explicitly probe the boundaries between high
art and more vernacular (or even kitsch) styles and sentiments.
In the series Posh Lust that followed Art Lovers, Maia focussed more closely on forging links
or contiguities between the displayed nude in western art, and the commercial circuits that
lead from studio to auction house, circuits that run between private and public spaces. If the
studio is traditionally a place of solitary activity and possible poverty, the auction house is a
location of posh lust, where desire (the desire to own works of art) is dressed in very
expensive clothes. These are small oil paintings on gessoed paper: a dry, close-pored, matt
surface. The formats are panoramic, the handling is looser, brushier, more evocative than in
the previous series. The works are packed with art historical allusion, in the forms of
paintings at auction houses: in She Works Hard for the Money, Manets Olympia (a work
that, it is fair to say, is unlikely to ever enter the auction house again) vies with works by
Georgia OKeefe and Drer: both the Manet and the Drer are iconic works in feminist
theorisation of the scopic regime entailed in the display of the female nude to the male gaze
in five centuries of western painting. In How Come You Never Go There, Gerhard Richter
meets Boucher, while in Some Like it Hot, the artist focuses on headless, splayed nudes by
Rodin and Duchamp.
Underpinning the project is a conceptual framework that harnesses Maias readings around
the art market (with special focus now on the auction house and on gender discrepancy in
sales of art) to her ticklish fascination with image appropriation on the one hand, and with
the extent to which the eroticised female body adds value to works of art on the other. The
series was granted further consistency by the fact that the titles were borrowed from
popular songs to which Maia listens while painting, bringing to the completed works an
allusion to the process of their production in the studio. The full cycle, from studio work to
commercial circuits, is thus covered in these tiny works.
In Valise (2013), the artist reprises all her themes and concerns, with a knowing wink at
Duchamps Bote en Valise, in which the celebrated dada anti-artist vexed the conditions of
original and reproduction that are so essential to the positioning of a work within the
system of the art market. Duchamps miniaturisation of his entire corpus into a deluxe
edition of photographic reproductions, served like a travelling salesmans valise as a
showcase. For Duchamp, that showcase became a portable museum. In this, Duchamp
operated a sly critique, both of coherent artistic (monographic) identity and of the uses of
photographic reproduction in the service of the archival systematisation of works of art.

Maias Valise too is a compendium of her previous works, each reproduced on a matchbox,
thus paying homage to Duchamp as conceptual precedent. Like Duchamps valise, Maias
allow us to explore the notion of scopic control facilitated by the miniature, and the illusory
satisfaction it produces, the satisfaction of complete knowledge. One glimpse affords us an
entire body of work: in the context of quick consumption that characterises our times, what
could be more apparently satisfying? With her customary wry humour, Maia gathers
together diverse cultural references entailed in the object matchbox (and that includes
Hans Christian Andersons story The Little Match-Seller and Aki Kaurismakis film The
Match Factory Girl), while ironically allowing that the low-value matchbox reproductions of
her works might serve as souvenirs for the fans. In this, as in Art Lovers and Posh Lust, Maia
implicitly but relentlessly pits the notion of market value against the subjective, personal
value with which individual viewers invest works of art, whether in the original or in
reproduction.
In Maia Hortas production of works outside of the studio, whether collaboratively or in the
social media, there is an impish, derisory wish to explode and undermine not only gendered
expectations and viewing conventions, but also the market conditions that facilitate and
sponsor these positions. But, significantly, in her studio practice, the artist remains faithful
to the traditional medium of painting in order to probe the structures at once spectatorial
and commercial that sustain the value of painting in the marketplace.

Ruth Rosengarten 2014