When I was seventeen years old, I was approached by a girl from my hometown to model for her clothing brand. With a group of five other teenage girls, I spent a warm day in June wandering around a greenhouse in denim cutoffs while two men, the brand owner’s brothers, followed us around with cameras. They took photographs and videos as we posed hand in hand, smiles stretched across our faces. We were strangers, but we were captured by these men’s lenses as a picture of girlhood and friendship.
A week later, when the girl uploaded the images to her brand’s Instagram page, I received a direct message.
“Hey,” the man had written. “You’re so photogenic! I’m a photographer, and I would love to shoot with you sometime.” When I clicked on his profile, I was greeted with a feed full of amateur shots of young women in minimal clothing, posing provocatively on poorly lit, bare-bones sets, their mouths parted and eyes wide. I ignored the message.
Two years later, on my nineteenth birthday, I invited my friends to a celebratory picnic. We dressed up in bright springtime colors and lounged atop blankets on the grassy floor of my backyard, snacking on vegan charcuterie and sipping on cheap champagne. When the sun began its departure from the sky, I posed for photos under the golden light. Later that evening, I posted one of the pictures. In the photo, I sat on my knees with my legs tucked under me, staring open-mouthed into the camera lens. I wore a vintage Victoria’s Secret slip, a flashy piece with pink and orange paisley and soft white lace trimming, cinched at the waist with a black corset. Before posting the picture, I photoshopped a pair of fairy wings sprouting from my back.
A while later, I got a direct message. Someone had sent me my own post. “Hi,” the attached message read. “You’re so photogenic! I’m a photographer, and I would love to shoot with you sometime.” I clicked on the profile. It was the same man.
When I opened the message, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. I wondered if he had recognized me, or if he simply stumbled across the picture. I wondered, when he saw me, if he saw a young woman, or if he saw an object in the shape of a woman, an object with the potential to benefit him in his work. I wondered how many times he had typed out that same message, how many girls he had sent it to, how many agreed because they felt special or recognized or just appreciated for their beauty.
The Muse has been a figure in the cultural lexicon since antiquity, the name given to the ancient Greek inspirational goddesses of the arts, literature, and sciences. In Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem dating back to the eighth-seventh century B.C.E., the poet writes of the origins of the Muses, daughters of Zeus: “Come thou, let us begin with the Muses who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympus with their songs,” he writes. “The goddesses sing of Zeus, the father of gods and men, as they begin and end their strain, how much he is the most excellent among the gods and supreme in power.” [36] While depictions vary, it is commonly accepted that there exist in Greek mythology nine distinct Muses, and each inspirational goddess is associated with a specific attribute: Calliope is the Muse of epic poetry; Cl[e]io, history; Erato, love poetry; Euterpe, music; Melpomene, tragedy; Polyhymnia, hymns and sacred poetry; Terpsichore, dance; Thal[e]ia, comedy; and Urania, astrology. The nine Muses are goddesses in their own right, but they are introduced singing the praises of their father, “the most excellent of Gods.” Immediately, it is made clear that their roles as divine sources of knowledge, creativity, and the arts are made to exist for the benefit of man. This knowledge and talent that belongs to them is made more important, more beneficial, when planted into the minds and mouths of a male vessel, whether God or mortal.
When Hesiod describes the nine Muses, he positions Calliope as “the chiefest of them all,” precisely because of her direct role in supporting male figures by attending to princes: “...Whomsoever of heaven-nourished princes the daughters of great Zeus honour, and behold him at his birth, they pour sweet dew upon his tongue, and from his lips flow gracious words.” [75] When Calliope and her sisters transfer this divine knowledge, in the form of gracious words, to be disseminated by these princes, any reverence is concurrently transferred from the Muse to the male vessel, and thus “all the people look towards him while he settles causes with true judgements: and he, speaking surely, would soon make wise end even of a great quarrel: for therefore are there princes wise in heart, because when people are being misguided in their assembly, they set right the matter again with ease, persuading them with gentle words. And when he passes through a gathering, they greet him as a god with gentle reverence, and he is conspicuous among the assembled: such is the holy gift of the Muses to men.” The Muses are transformed from goddesses to objects. They are propagators of knowledge and talent, a gift to be received by men, and their status of godhood is reassigned to the recipient along with the recognition of their divine gift as something belonging to them:
For it is through the Muses and far-shooting Apollo that there are singers and harpers upon the earth: but princes are of Zeus, and happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his mouth. For though a man have sorrow and grief in his newly-troubled soul and live in dread because his heart is distressed, yet, when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all; but the gifts of the goddesses soon turn him away from these. [75]
When a prince speaks these words of wisdom, he is shrouded in praise and reverence, seen as wise in heart and looked to as a source of sagacity in the face of conflict or ignorance. This divine feminine knowledge, creativity, and wisdom, when disseminated through a male vessel, becomes inherently more valuable. For all their divinity and expertise, it is not the Muses who may reap the benefits of artistic expression, but rather it is the men, mortal or immortal, who borrow from them and cite them as their inspiration.
When we think of the Muse as a figure in contemporary culture today, our understanding is not far removed from that of ancient Greek mythology. The Muse is defined as a source of artistic inspiration. The term is not inherently gendered, but our understanding of the Muse as a cultural symbol makes it likely that its utterance summons a feminine image in the minds of those who hear the word. When we think of the artist’s Muse, we think of wives and partners, of actresses and models, of dancers and socialites. We think of the Zelda to an F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Jane Birkin to a Jean-Louis Dumas, the Edie Sedgwick to an Andy Warhol. We think of the women and girls whose lives and images were lent, distorted, and exploited by male artists in their endeavors to create iconic pieces of artistic history. We read parts of these women in classic literature, see their faces and bodies depicted in paintings hung in galleries around the globe, and feel their auras echoed through fashionable designs. But it’s easy to forget the real women whose lives are picked apart and pieced loosely together in the works of revered men. Our relationship to the Muse is only with fragments of herself that have been selected and mediated through the artist’s lens. When we see a Birkin bag, do we think of Jane, or do we first see a symbol of luxury, a commodification of her style in the form of a five-figure Hermes purse?
For artists, the feminine Muse is a means to an end, a tool to be used for endless creative inspiration until their perceived value is diminished. These (often male) artists draw from the beauty, youth, and willingness of these women to endure this role until they no longer serve them in gaining social and economic capital. When the Muse grows tired of this exploitation, she is met with vitriol, accused of lacking gratitude. The Muse is an object to be looked at, whose essence is to be pulled from, a necessary instrument without which the impetus to create art would be lost. She, like the Greek Muses, is a gift to be received by the male artist, a divine image for him to spread until he reaches the status of icon. But when the Muse is presented to the world by these male artists as a spectacle, something of her true self is lost. When our only image of the Muse is mediated through the male gaze, we as spectators are forced to view her through this scopophilic lens.
The concept of the “male gaze” was first coined by Laura Mulvey in her monumental essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, where she expands on Freudian concepts of scopophilia and ego libido to explain that the world of cinema has played off of the scopophilic instinct (i.e., the pleasure one derives from looking at another person as an erotic object) in order to reinforce patriarchal structures of representation that position women as the passive, raw material for the active gaze of a man: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,” she writes, “Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.” In the time since the release of this essay, the concept of the male gaze has been expanded and applied to a wide array of artistic media outside of cinema, as a way to describe the voyeuristic fantasies of men that consciously or unconsciously bleed into the representation of women, their stories, and their bodies, as a public spectacle for consumption.
When we view a painting of a woman by a man, this scopophilic fetishization emerges from the fragmentation of the female body. The Muse’s image is transformed from the external vessel for a human soul to an object to be depicted; a tool for arousing feelings from its spectators, to be commodified for the social and financial gain of the artist. Every part of the muse, from how she is posed to how she is captured and translated onto the canvas, to what happens to that representation of her—Is she hung in a gallery? Sold to a private owner to ornament the walls of their home —is dependent on the choices of the active male artist, the owner of the gaze through which her image is transmitted.
One of the most infamous relationships between a male artist and his Muse is that of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. When Warhol met Sedgwick, it was something akin to a whirlwind romance between artist and Muse, a year-long relationship during which Warhol was able to draw from the woman fifteen years his junior until he crossed a line from which he couldn’t return. In a 2017 article for Vanity Fair, Lili Anolik describes their working relationship as “one of the great romances of the 1960s,” but also makes clear that “the two were opposites. Were, in fact, radically, diametrically, almost violently opposed…She was the beauty to his beast, the princess to his pauper, the exhibitionist to his voyeur…” Warhol was homosexual, but that fact did not much alter his consumptive dynamic with the young socialite. His sexuality did not bar him from culpability in framing her as a beautiful object to be scopophilically consumed. Rather, Anolik writes, what was "fundamental was Andy’s frustrated narcissism. He was the boy who didn’t like what he saw when he gazed into the pool, and thus was doomed, in a permanent state of unfulfilled desire. Edie’s method of seduction was to take her shoulder-length dark hair, chop it off, bleach it a metallic shade of blond so that it matched his wig, and dress herself in the striped boatnecked shirts that had become his uniform. In other words, to turn herself into the reflection of his dreams.”
This mutual obsession was short-lived and came to a head following the premiere of Poor Little Rich Girl, a pettily titled film following a day in Sedgwick’s life. As Warhol recalls, Sedgwick angrily confronted him, saying, “Everyone in New York is laughing at me. These movies are making a complete fool out of me! Everyone knows I just stand around in them doing nothing, and you film it, and what kind of talent is that?” At the time, a year into their relationship, The New York Times reports, the star was running out of money. She had transformed herself into a New York icon, the epitome of the era’s ideals of beauty and style, but the man tasked with immortalizing her image was presenting her to the world as a lazy, entitled “Poor Little Rich Girl.”
And what was the artist’s response to her frustration? It was, according to Warhol, to yell back at her: “But don’t you understand? These movies are art!” Sedgwick is still remembered today as her image; a fragmentation of herself as she existed in the public eye. When artist Robert Rauschenberg spoke of the Muse for Jean Stein’s 1982 book, Edie: An American Biography, he literally described her as an object, saying: “I was always intimidated and self-conscious when I talked to her or was in her presence because she was like art. I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created.”
In a heteronormative patriarchal society, it is not only the heterosexual, cisgender male who is capable of misrepresenting the feminine Muse through the lens of the male gaze. This determining gaze has seeped through all aspects of society, from art to advertising to one’s self-perception. We are taught to spend our money on beautifying serums and powders and creams. We are taught that sex sells, that feminine youth and beauty are commodities for us to exploit until these qualities are milked dry with age. We are taught that, as women, there is a certain way we need to show up in society in order to be deemed presentable and respectable and beautiful. We are taught that embracing these ideas will be rewarded in the form of social currency and that the subversion of these norms is viewed with discomfort, even disdain.
Power Play: A Girl Behind A Gun plays with this tension, deliberately rejecting the idea of the Muse as a passive object and spectacle to be scopophilically consumed. We have grown accustomed to this gender positioning in a society where the male gaze permeates cultural representations of the feminine Muse, but this exhibition inverts this dynamic by shifting power toward the female artist, allowing them to take control as active, dominant storytellers in a narrative of feminine desire and eroticism. This time, the Muse is not a passive object to be broken down into parts and commodified. She is both the actor and the role, the erotic and the eroticized, the art and the artist.