Art Rookie: Abject Women, Feminine Beauty and the Art of Elena Garrigolas

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Across the Western cultural landscape, in paintings and photographs, in feature-length films and TikToks, the female body is often captured and depicted as "beautiful." Beauty becomes an extension of femininity, of being a "woman." But what constitutes beauty? The age-old adage: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" comes to mind. This is a relatively fair claim that emphasises that ideas of beauty can mean different things to different people but is, as most cliches go, a blatant oversimplification. It is apparent now more than ever that individual tastes are not free from white supremacy, fatphobia, ageism and sexism. Yet this deliberate programming by advertising and mass media seems to be stuck in an infinite loop that sees bodies, faces and even ethnicities as trends. Popular for one trend cycle and gone in another. 

Beauty, at least the form of beauty that sells us mascara, retinol and filler, is predetermined by what is socially acceptable. In her formative book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argues that "the beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance," speaking to the behaviours and rituals that one must repeat to attain and hold onto beauty. While cis-gender men have their own complicated relationship with beauty and masculinity, beauty can often feel like a prerequisite to womanhood. Perhaps this conflation of beauty and femininity is why many artists in the 1960s and 1970s turned towards the grotesque, the ugly and the abject in their exploration of femininity and the body.

The psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva developed the term abjection, or the state of being cast off, in her book Powers of Horror. According to Kristeva, abjection refers to the raw, unsettling and repulsive aspects of the human experience that are often suppressed or hidden. The abject encompasses everything from blood, milk, bodily fluids and faeces to loose hair that gets stuck in a drain. It essentially draws upon that uncanny feeling that comes up when anything that is supposed to be inside the body exists outside the body or, as Kristeva posits, anything that disturbs "identity, system, order." 

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This notion of the abject is evident in artworks such as the Post-Partum Document (1973-79), where the artist Mary Kelly printed details of her son's diet on used liners from his diapers and displayed them as art at the ICA, employing the visceral power of seeing her son's actual excrement to explore maternal anxiety and the asymmetrical division of domestic labour. In Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy (1964), the artist and eight other performers, while covered in paint, slithered around raw meat, plastic, more wet paint and their own bodies in a concept that Schneeman calls "kinetic painting" to challenge cultural taboos around sex. The work of Kiki Smith, who saw bodies as sites of social and political turmoil, depicts vulnerability and violence through sculptures such as Blood Pool (1992) which was made at the height of the AIDS crisis as blood became a signifier of mortality.

“The abject encompasses everything from blood, milk, bodily fluids and faeces to loose hair that gets stuck in a drain. It essentially draws upon that uncanny feeling that comes up when anything that is supposed to be inside the body exists outside the body.”

Viewed through this modality, abjection operates on the periphery of social norms, and when materialised as works of art, it tends to have a subversive quality that confronts established norms and binaries of beauty, power and gender. In her essay Reclaiming the Feminine Identity through the Abject, Yuxin (Vivian) Wen emphasises this function of abject art by arguing that "in an established patriarchal social order, while the female bodily functions and matters are often objected, they could be leveraged upon by women artists to dismantle the borders of gender and destabilise traditional gender identities.”

Kristeva's writing on abjection was crucial to my viewing of Catalan-based artist Elena Garrigolas's work at her solo show at the Saatchi Yates in London. Garrigolas's rendering of women's bodies, stifled smiles, exaggerated breasts, and crying babies in the form of bum cheeks projected a sense of unease that emerged through the thick layers of oil pastels on her canvases. There was a sense of urgency, too. An urgency that, as the press statement suggests, comes from the artist's conservative upbringing in a religious family and the repression at the centre of it. 

Garrigolas invokes qualities of surrealism and contemporary meme culture to confront life burdened by a repressive childhood, personal vulnerabilities, toxic masculinity and the overwhelming expectations placed on women. She explicitly challenges the objectification of women in works such as The mortifying ordeal of being known, where Garrigolas depicts a naked woman with her legs spread apart as a toilet. In another work, aptly titled Ideal Woman, the artist covers her subject's torso with boobs, which in my close reading, emphasises how inauthentic and fabricated the beauty myth really is. 

Works that verge on the brink of abjection, such as My Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Farm, where Garrigolas depicts a man sucking on the udders of a human-cow figure with an anthropomorphic head of a girl with a stoic expression, or Self-Portrait (Snail Woman), that depicts the artist with a snail's body is where Garrigolas shines. In this space between real life and surrealism, her sardonic wit interacts with her interest in internet humour. “My generation is always online, and what you find online is very strange... something I like is that I think our humour hasn't changed. I love the marginalia in mediaeval manuscripts; they're filled with hybrid creatures or genitalia with faces - it's the same kind of thing you see with people photoshopping ridiculous collages. It feels like a really nice full-circle moment. History repeats itself. I want memes to be incorporated more into art - when I feel sad, I don't want to look at hyper realistic things; I want to look at strange things online,” she shares in her artist statement. 

Deeply rooted realms of the grotesque and the humorous, Garrigolas's paintings are not a tool of empowerment; instead, they subvert the notion that women's bodies, specifically white women's bodies, are pure, delicate, and chaste. Garrigolas's subjects can be animalistic, puke up babies, marry lobsters or possess feet that resemble the "idealised female form." While Garrigolas's use of abject is not overt and is significantly different from artists working in the mid-late 20th century, it still disrupts identity markers, our cultural concept of womanhood and what should and should not be seen.

Words: Zara Aftab