Who's Afraid of Male Nude? On Ora Ruven's Work

Professor Tal Dekel · Exhibition text · FEMOSTERONE

At the centre of the work stand large-scale paintings of male nudes, alongside digital pieces that likewise show such nudity. In the digital works the naked man is presented as an object of seduction and voyeurism, swathed in lace, soft fabrics, and gold; parts of his body peep at the viewer while his face stays hidden. The gaze is erotic, verging on pornographic, addressed to the partner in looking who shares the voyeurism with sympathy�€”lace, gold, lit candles, romance. The paintings, too, cast the naked man as subject to voyeurism and seduction, reversing the gaze traditionally held by the male artist towards the female model. In one painting in the series, a naked man lies loosely wrapped in lace on soft golden sheets; intimate parts of his body peer at the viewer while his face is veiled. In another, a man looks straight at his partner-painter, sharing the erotic adventure they have entered together. The men who model for Ruven are not professional models and do not match standard ideals of the beautiful male body.

The pornography industry is a case study from which much can be learned about mainstream attitudes towards the female body�€”which differ sharply from how women usually depict men’s bodies. Male-oriented mainstream porn mostly shows the woman’s body in fragments, in extreme close-up, objectifying her and erasing her subjectivity. It is pornography of functionality alone.

Ruven’s works reflect the long and winding path feminist artists have walked since the 1970s until today in portraying the male body.

Man as an object of women’s desire, in Ruven’s treatment, is a reversal of roles. Many women artists over recent decades have taken up the reversal of traditional cultural roles in their work. Some feminist projects cast the artist as strong opposite a weakened man, sometimes figuring sex as harsh or threatening. In Ruven, the reversal has another character: the man is the object of the woman’s desire�€”rather than the power play of man/woman relations, a new agenda is set in which the woman addresses her object through desire mixed with tenderness, beauty, and romance. The artist does not stand for a woman seizing the man’s powerful place to prove her strength against him; she expresses her femininity in relation to the man. At the same time, her power as woman and as artist is undeniable, embodied in men for whom modelling is not a profession yet who undress before her for painting and photography.

The paintings are realistic, usually medium in format, and show older men�€”authentic, far from the muscular, sculpted, conventionally handsome model. Nudity is sometimes so direct as to embarrass. Most painted men sit in an armchair in a classic model pose, or lie on a bed, holding the viewer/painter’s gaze. Another is “caught” asleep in the nude, unaware of the painting under way; in another work a man stands, cupping his face in his hands, his genitals awkwardly exposed to the viewer.

The painting manner is traditional and the scene classical�€”a nude model seated before the painter�€”yet the content that accrues from this pairing is not classical or traditional in the least.

At first glance male nudity seems wholly normal for viewers used to maximal bodily exposure in the media. Yet a survey of contemporary art shows that while the male nude appears in much work by men, it is almost wholly missing from work by women artists.

Turn to the last few decades of history: the time when women were finally admitted to the canon; the feminist revolution of the early 1970s that brought new winds of equality, freedom of action and artistic production, and sexual freedom�€”so that early feminist artists could say what was on their minds. They used that freedom only rarely to describe the male nude, and when they did, protest was the loudest note in the work. Many painted men as deformed, frightening, ridiculous, pathetic, or repellent�€”voicing the pain of patriarchal history, a history that left little room for empathy, sensuality, eroticism, or love between the sexes, or for a woman’s love of a man.

Women’s sexuality�€”that dark unknown, as the father of psychology put it�€”is handled by the artist Ora Ruven with honesty and daring.

Over time parts of that void have been filled. The Women’s Liberation Movement, born in the late 1960s in the United States, and the waves of feminism since the 1970s, opened talk of female sexuality and made space for subjects such as love between women, masturbation, and in general women’s right to their own bodies. Still, early theoretical writing and art seldom lingered on women who wanted to go on having relationships with the men in their lives. Research on women’s sexuality in relation to men was scarce, and feminist women seeking to live equally with male partners found few practical guidelines. How, then, can a woman artist look at a man, study him, paint him? Does a woman not see a man differently from how he sees her? That question bites all the more if she wants to keep a feminist position�€”and it is precisely where Ruven stands in her work.

Perhaps another reason stopped women from taking up the male nude. Perhaps the taboo on male nudity still burns so fiercely that breaking it feels impossible. A woman who shows sexual interest in a man may still fear ostracism, the social finger that labels her loose or promiscuous. Perhaps the “respectable” woman in the twenty-first century still deems herself “worthy” only insofar as the “normative” man deems her worthy�€”as a sanctified mother of his children, almost asexual, not the light-minded model for a nude, nor an artist who paints male nudes herself. In other words, the woman has not yet broken free of a self-image dictated by male culture.

This perception leads us to John Berger’s claim in Ways of Seeing (1972) about the power of the male gaze:

Men act and women appear.

That is, the man exercises power over the woman, who serves as a passively present object. Berger argued that women are not only seen by men�€”they also see themselves through men’s eyes, from the viewpoint of the male onlooker. For him this is not narcissism but the constitution of identity: women’s identity is effectively fixed only by how they are reflected in the male other’s eyes. This principle, Berger held, governs not only women’s relation to themselves but most kinds of relations between men and women.

As Tanya Augsburg wrote in the 2011 catalogue Man as Object �€“ Reversing the Gaze, Berger’s text paved the way for theorizing the gaze in feminist film theory, beginning with Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Mulvey built on Berger, drawing on psychoanalysis to describe an active/passive heterosexual division of labour steering film narrative. Augsburg explains that for Mulvey, women are depicted as sexual objects for the male gaze, as spectacle and icon; men bear the spectator’s look but cannot bear sexual objectification. E. Ann Kaplan, in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (1983), was among the critics who developed this line of thought.

We can therefore widen the male gaze beyond desire to Berger’s distinction between saint and whore�€”a distinction women artists still often adopt today�€”so that the male nude is seldom treated, or is treated without much sympathy.

Yet few theoretical writings or artistic examples from the 1970s and 1980s offered feminist women who wished to keep having relationships and sexual intimacy with the men in their lives a clear path. Few answers or ground rules reached early feminists who wanted to stay with male partners as sexual equals. Books and articles on female sexuality in tandem with men’s were hard to find then. That question is now posed in the work of the contemporary Israeli artist Ora Ruven.

Ora Ruven has reclaimed the gaze. Yet in her painting, where she looks at the man’s eyes and genitals and paints them with the same blunt force, there is no domination, no possessiveness, no objectification�€”unlike countless female nudes men have painted through art history.

The gaze�€”the main tool of objectification in art�€”is here the artist’s as she studies the male nude, thereby placing herself in a position of power.

But has she turned that gaze and the power it gives her into an instrument of control?

In the paintings the man appears in full masculinity, full presence. He stands upright, rendered in warm colours and pools of light�€”paintings that respect him as subject. This is a proposal to see nudity and sexuality as something free of domination. That is the nature of the female gaze on the nude: it ties eroticism and desire to sexuality, warmth, and love�€”not to domination. In that, the female gaze on the nude differs from the male gaze, which expresses desire for conquest and possession.

Ruven’s works stand for a femininity not framed by dominant male culture. It is liberated femininity, built by itself, while resting on the freedom first feminist foremothers won for her�€”freedom still far from fully realized.