How does art shape ideas? Join these I explore this question through conversations with philosophers and thinkers about the influence of art on their scholarly work.
I’m Pat McConville and this is Concept : Art.
In this episode I speak with Dr Elese Dowden.
We discussed fabrication and sovereignty, make-up artistry and hyper representation, and patriarchy and postfeminism.
Dr Elese Dowden is a writer and philosopher from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her doctoral work was on ethical restoration after historical injustice, and her ongoing cross-disciplinary research interests include Continental philosophy, Australian and New Zealand literature, critical theory, history and colonialism.
Dr Elese Dowden, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Thanks for having me, Pat.
Can you begin by telling us a little about yourself and how you came to be doing your academic work?
Yeah. So I’m from Tāmaki Makaurau, in Auckland, I’ve got British ancestry, but my family’s— Both my sets of grandparents came over on the boats in the ‘60s, to Aotearoa, to Auckland, to South Auckland specifically, which I’m quite proud of because South Auckland is not known for being a place that produces hundreds of budding academics, in the media at least. So yeah, I came from there. I did my Bachelor’s and then I was like, “oh, I quite like this academic stuff”. I went on to do my Honours after that and after I did my Honours, my Master’s supervisor said, “hey, if you want to keep going, I’ll supervise you for Master’s.” So I was like, well, I’m not doing anything else. So did that and then Master’s on cosmopolitanism and gender. And then got lost a bit there.
But after that I applied for a scholarship in Australia, in Meanjin, in Brisbane, on Marguerite La Caze’s project, called “Ethical Restoration after Mass Atrocity”, and to my great surprise, I got this scholarship. So, had to move to Meanjin, to Brisbane, and then yeah, my whole life just changed. I began working as an academic, I suppose, on this project. Marguerite was a great supervisor and I got a lot out of it, really; like she was— really, really encouraged me to write a lot, to present at conferences, the sort of things that your supervisor should do, I suppose. But she’s just a great mentor, and, like, also a great writer; she really helped me to learn how to write. Which I think is really underestimated in academic work, and then after that I went to Canada for a bit, just worked as a barista there for a while and then came back here just before the pandemic hit.
Moved to Naarm, then I started like a sort-of reading group, which we were calling the Australasian Posthumanities. So we were trying to bring together lots of different disciplines, like an interdisciplinary situation. Eventually, through this community of people, I sort-of came to literature, started going to MSCP courses – like Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. Eventually, I taught two of my own MSCP courses, then got involved with the Melbourne School of Literature as well, of which I was, like, the founding Secretary.
I’ve been involved with the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy as well. Yeah, mostly I just love people. I really love talking to people about their ideas and like, reading what people are thinking about and how they’re responding to the conditions that we’re under. So, philosophy and literature, I suppose, and art more broadly, allow me to do those things. So I just— I can’t stop, you know? I’m compelled.
Thanks so much, Elese. That’s great. Has art influenced your academic work?
Most definitely, in that I think a lot of academic work is art.
But yeah, before— I before I did my PhD I did make-up artistry. Did a make-up artistry certificate and then wrote a beauty blog for a while. Even that, just looking at fashion make-up and even special effects make-up, I was, like, this is an art form. I feel like this has always been part of my life, you know?
That’s a really interesting background in the context of the work that you’ve done.
Yeah, it is quite funny. I think ultimately for me it’s the representation of the body which is, like, the most— It just sort of unites a lot of what I do. Not just in the sense of like beauty, but also in the sense of agency, culpability, responsibility. Who should we listen to? Who has authority? Who doesn’t have authority? Who is telling the truth? Who is wilfully, sort-of, creating some sort of falsehood? Who thinks they’re telling the truth, but they’re not? Like, how do we represent different bodies in different senses of agency through the representation of the body, I suppose, yeah.
Yeah, that’s really interesting. A lot of your work is about historical injustice, colonialism, and sovereignty. You’ve thought a lot about the origins of settler states like Australia and, in fact, the origins of the concept of a state constituted under a sovereign. Can you tell us about the work of Vincent Namatjira and some of his works that have influenced or resonate with your thinking? Maybe we can start with his 2014 work, James Cook – with the Declaration.
Yeah, for sure. I really, I love this work. It came to my attention, I think, during an MSCP course I did called The Poetics of Rebellion and someone linked me this Astrid Lorange article about the work. And the picture itself is, like, James Cook: it says, “James Cook – with the Declaration”. Vincent Namatjira has called it that.
But there are a few weird tensions about this, which Lorange points out in the article. So, you’ve got sort of the fact that there was no declaration, the Declaration of Independence is an American thing, right? We seem to adopt a lot of American imperial ideas, but we don’t have a declaration. There was a proclamation, but that wasn’t what allowed Cook to take possession of Australia, as Lorange also points out.
In this painting Cook is, you know, writing on his own body, and there’s a kind of fabricated history or, you know, implication that this declaration, which never actually existed, would be doing any legal work.
Yeah, well, he’s writing on the front of his shirt. So, it is literally a fabrication. You know, it’s very good.
And his shirt is sort-of part of— Well, I guess it’s part of his clothing, but it seems to be kind of an extension of his body, I guess— I mean, there’s no other, sort of— There’s no objects in the painting. He sort of looks like he’s sitting, but he’s sitting, sort of, on himself or on his coat or something.
Yeah. It’s kind of like an action figure or something, it’s all like unified, the whole thing.
Namatjira also has a 2018 work entitled Queen Elizabeth and Donald. It’s a seemingly cheerful painting of the late Queen Elizabeth holding a cup of tea, and President Donald Trump holding a bag of McDonald’s. What does this portrait of an English sovereign and an American head of government mean to you?
Again, it just points out the fiction and the fantasy of it. I think it’s also significant that they’re both holding a sort of representative, like, food item like Elizabeth’s got this cup of tea – I mean, I assume it’s tea – it’s got like the British flag on it. Mr Trump is holding, you know, McDonald’s and it’s got the McDonald’s logo on it. And I honestly think this shows, at least for me, it represents the progression from like British colonial rule to American imperial rule or at least the major influences over Australian, like, politics, governance, everything today.
But even the colonisation of the Americas is kind of like this. Like the way we’d say America and we don’t mean— We don’t mean, like, Venezuela. We mean, like, you know, the USA. This totally fabricated nation state, which is also like Australia, like a fiction, right? I mean, there is nothing physically holding the states together. There is nothing physically holding the, like, states of Australia together either. It’s just this big sort of legal fiction which I think Namatjira’s work really beautifully demonstrates as well as that sort of lineage, with Cook and the Queen. And you know, so yeah, I think this is—
I also just love the way that Namatjira paints white people. It’s so funny; it’s just so cheeky and just so good. He manages to just make them look really goofy and ridiculous in a way that I don’t think many other artists or people representing them do. I mean, Trump seems to make himself look goofy, so it really is quite something to make him look even goofier than he already makes himself look, you know? But this goofiness, I think, is it also draws attention to something a bit more sinister or sort of like a flip side. Like, there is a funny part to it, but there’s also this, like, “are these really our leaders? Are these really the people who are in charge of, like, massive nation states? Like, why are we following people who are this ridiculous and, you know, blatantly just sort-of silly and making stuff up and making up fictions about what happened and what’s real?”
Like when he paints indigenous people, he doesn’t paint them in this way; like the one— Adam Goodes. You know, what was it called? Stand Strong For Who You Are. The one that won the Archibald prize. Everyone in that picture is very serious and, like, powerful, but in the ones of Trump and Elizabeth and Cook, they just look ridiculous. It’s so good.
The way that art represents not just one thing I think is really valuable; like we can’t have scholarship without art and often, like, I say, I think they are the same thing. There’s no one meaning. You can never say something and have it understood perfectly, you know?
I had seen Namatjira’s work before, and I had always just kind of thought of it as a pretty straightforward satire or parody, I guess, of the people that he paints in the situations that he paints, but there’s a lot more to it.
There really is. There’s a few paintings from the same series as the Elizabeth and Donald stuff. He’s got one where I think he’s painted himself and he’s got his arm around Donald Trump and it says like, “Make APY Great Again” [Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands]. And that one just confounds me. I just like, yeah, I just can’t stop— I can’t figure that one out. I don’t think there is one message to come from it, you know? He just, like, yeah, I love it, it’s great stuff.
I think literature is a really good way for us to represent these problems too. Like, yeah, ϖ.O.’s work, I think, is particularly good because he essentially writes these insane, like, histories of Australian art and literature and just culture. Specifically, he’s got this book called Fitzroy, which goes through the history of Fitzroy; he’s got a book called Heide which goes through the art history of Australia. In all of it he just plays with truth and, like, he has this sort of multiplicity thing going as well, you know? He’s just— You can’t always tell if what he’s saying is 100% true. I think most of it is true, but there’s definitely some creative licence there, and I think that what is work kind of shows us is that, yeah, things are pretty blurry. You’re not going to get a clear picture of truth, and in that sense, I think his representations of Australian art history are more faithful than, like, anybody else’s, you know?
His work is really important to me, but also Vivienne Blaxell’s work. Vivienne writes these incredible essays. There’s one in Meanjin called “Nuclear Cats”. And, like, oh my God, they’re just so good; they’re like almost schizophrenic and their, like, representation of different things— Sometimes you’re not sure who’s talking; sometimes you’re not sure whose perspective it’s from, but it really blurs, like, the sense of autonomy and the sense of representation because it— Every time you’re like, “oh, but who’s doing that? What’s happening?” It kind of whacks you over the head and it’s like, “don’t worry, keep reading, you know? It doesn’t matter.” That’s great. I love it.
You have a paper called “Other Body, Obscene Selfie: A Sartrean Reading of Kim Kardashian-West” in the journal Hecate. In this paper, you consider the forms of being in subjectivity that were expressed in Kim Kardashian’s 2016 International Women’s Day selfie, which she tweeted, and the complications that selfies generally might pose to patriarchal structures. Can you tell us a bit about this paper?
Yeah, I’ll do my best cause I published it a little while ago. But yeah, I think it’s a useful— It’s weirdly one of the most cited things I have. Whenever people are like, “oh, your Kim Kardashian paper”. And I’m like, “oh Christ, what did I write?” I don’t know. So at that time I was pretty deep into phenomenology and existentialism and specifically, like, Sartrean existentialism, and I was probably having a kind of moment that I’m sure that a lot of women in philosophy have with [Jean Paul] Sartre where you’re just like, “this guy? I don’t know. He’s got a good framework, but is he kind of a misogynist? Yeah. All right.” So, I was kind of going through a bit of that. There’s a really good article called “Holes and Slime”, but I was reading through that and it was— Like, yeah just sort of on social media a lot, thinking about the body. This was closer to the time when I— I was writing a beauty blog at the time, I think too.
So I was really thinking about how women represent themselves on the Internet. I was also reading some of Amy Shields Dobson‘s work on, like, postfeminism and the way that young women especially represent themselves online. And yeah, I think Sartre does, did give me a useful way into that, but I’m not sure if I want to keep using that kind of framework, because I think it does ultimately kind of fix the feminine body and say that this is an object, which kind of ended up coming through in the reading I did, I think.
When I gave the paper at the Excess and Desire conference at UQ [University of Queensland], there was a scholar that I think it might have been Jeanine Leane, but I can’t remember, who pointed out that my reading of Kim Kardashian as, like, an object was problematic because I was doing male gaze to Kim Kardashian effectively, which is true. At that time, I kind of felt like there were there was a separation between Kim Kardashian the brand and Kim Kardashian the person, and that her representation of herself is what I was looking at. But I’m not sure if that came through that strongly in the paper.
But yeah, I guess, I guess my thinking’s just sort of starting to shift. Yeah, the idea of representation is obviously really pertinent right now, but I think maybe the more representing we try to do of ourselves, the less we can actually represent ourselves, which is the paradox at the heart of it all. I think, yeah, my thinking’s changed on this. So I find it hard to talk to that paper in some respects.
So that paper, when I read it, I read it as kind of fairly optimistic about the power of selfies to undermine the patriarchal gaze and patriarchal structures. And I think that’s a little bit in contrast to some of your later work. It might be a good time to ask you about the picture “Perfect Penthouse I Want More” by Victoria Todorov from 2022, a bit after you published this paper.
Yeah, I love this painting. Todorov had a whole series of these paintings from, something— I think it was called “The Bipolarity of Output” or something. I just love it, though, I think that— You have to hear the backstory behind this painting first though. It’s a crazy painting.
So, Todorov has not painted this painting herself. She’s sent it off to be painted by someone else, I think in Hong Kong, and then she gets them sent back. So, the entire painting is totally artificial. I am pretty sure as well that the person in the painting is someone on Instagram, so the whole thing is just like extremely artificial. The picture itself is like someone taking a selfie. It’s a woman taking a selfie. She’s sort of quite conventionally attractive I suppose; she’s got a lot of the sort of features that most people would associate with, like Instagram beauty, especially around 2022.
She has massive lips though. Like, I don’t know, it’s a little obscene honestly. I have to be a bit careful about what I say here, I suppose, but it looks like she’s had quite a bit of plastic surgery, specifically on her lips. And this idea that you’re kind of looking at someone, and they’re taking a selfie, and they’ve got these ridiculous lips— It’s just insane. The fact that it’s been painted as well, it’s just— The levels of artificiality in this painting. It’s just mind blowing to me.
And, like, I’m not, I’m not anti-plastic surgery; like, people, do what you want with your body, it’s your body, you know. I look at— I looked at a lot of Todorov’s work. There are quite a few paintings or representations of people who have either botched plastic surgery or just really over-the-top plastic surgery, like, the kind of surgery you just couldn’t— You’re not trying to replicate something that would occur naturally. Put it that way, I suppose. That sense of, like, excess, and like inflation and just, like, maximalism, I think, is really fascinating. And the idea that we would want to make our bodies look like not human, in a way, or like ultra-human, perhaps at the same time, I’m not sure. I’m not sure how these people who get really hectic plastic surgery see what they’re doing, or if they do, or if it’s part of a dysmorphia.
But again, even that idea that that’s dysmorphia is medicalising it and saying there’s something wrong with you, whereas they might just be like, “what do you mean? It’s my body. I do what I want”, you know? Yeah. Again, like I don’t really want to tell people how to how they should deal with their bodies. Like, it’s pretty hard to have a body in the first place, so.
This, yeah, this painting really speaks to that for me. Yeah, this representation of the body and also, yeah, I guess this does connect back to the Kardashian stuff because it’s, like, if we are just, if we’re going kind of like hyper on the objectification, if we’re like, “well, if you’re going to objectify me, let me just go 100,000 percent into that. You know, let me just go like hard on that. Or something.” Like does that solve it? I don’t know. I mean when I wrote the paper I was like, “this is kind of subversive. Kim Kardashian’s being like, ‘well, everyone’s going to objectify me. I may as well like do it myself too,’ or something like that.” But yeah, I don’t know if that’s the case.
When were you writing the beauty blog. Was that about the same time as you were writing this paper?
I think I’d just stopped doing the beauty blog when I wrote that paper. I’d been writing, like, general blogs for a while, so I guess I was a bit of a blogger, so I knew other people who were in, like, the sort of New Zealand blogging space, I suppose, like so some of my friends were also bloggers and a lot of them were beauty bloggers. I think probably through just people I got into that, but definitely through make-up artistry as well, like learning, like being with all the women and we’d just all come together and do each other’s makeup and, like, learn stuff together. And yeah, I really enjoyed that.
And I think it probably was seeing, like, how much you could change how someone felt about themselves. You could show them something about themselves they might not have seen before, or even just to help someone feel more like themselves. Like all of that, seemed really powerful. And so, I think through that it helped me to understand like the actual power of beauty and, like, the rituals and the routines that we have around beauty and, like, even—
There’s a scholar called Hannah McCann and she was doing something on how, like, domestic violence and hairdressing and how people would often go to their hairdressers and totally spill everything about their domestically-violent relationship. And then hairdressers didn’t really know what to do about this. So they started bringing in specific training for hairdressers, like targeted at hairdressers. I think that was part of Hannah’s project. But yeah, just these sorts of things. I was like, “oh yeah”, but it’s even the make-up that we learned to do wasn’t just make-up that made people feel beautiful. Like we learned, all kinds of different make-up. Some of it was for like fashion shows and print and editorial stuff, but a lot of it was also just special effects.
You can make someone very ugly, which is also very exciting, and honestly, like, I think that was the most fun that any of us had, because we were just like, “we want to be really ugly. Like we want to”— It was very fun day when we did the full special effects make-up because all of us, there was probably like 15 of us, and we were all different ages, nationalities. We just looked crazy together because we all looked like we’ve just been totally attacked or like in car crashes or something. We all walked round the street together, cracking up. It was really good fun.
So I’d just sort of stopped doing that. And maybe I was just processing, like, these ideas of beauty and even the idea that, like, being a beauty blogger, like, is that an ethical thing for me to be doing? I don’t know. You know, so I sort of stopped doing it because it just got a bit too— I just got a bit mixed up about it and I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to be doing.
I can’t help but think that must have some connection with your scholarly interests.
Yeah, definitely does, definitely does. I think I suppose when I’ve— Because I’ve written about beauty and I’ve written about products and I’ve put make-up on a lot of different people’s face. And yeah, now I write poetry and literature as well and, like, now I do literary reviews too. I think a lot of this. I’m just thinking about how do we represent people? Like, the power of representation is enormous, and maybe it’s honestly all there is. Like, it’s pretty scary. So if we if we’re going to do representation, we’ve got to think really carefully about how we’re doing it and, like, what it shows us too.
You’ve also published a poem in Cordite in connection with some new work that you’re doing on what you call Girlboss Leviathan, which offers a more, I think, pessimistic view of some expressions of supposed femininity on social media. Can you tell us a bit about that?
I suppose the trajectory for me is, like, leaning into the self-objectification and then moving to a place where I’m like, “no, we cannot be doing that, or at least I cannot be doing that. Other people maybe do what you want, you know?”
But it puts, it brings us to the space where it’s like, well, how do we represent ourselves if it’s just always self-objectification or if it’s just like, I don’t know— I don’t think that people who have born men have this problem in the same way. It’s like you don’t always maybe have to think about how you’re being, how you’re representing yourself, or maybe you do? I don’t know. I’m not— I can’t really speak for men. But it seems to me that it’s much more difficult to just walk around and be super conscious of how you’re appearing all the time. And maybe we could simply not. But I think women and people who are not born men, I guess, are more conditioned into this constant like self-surveillance. And that surveillance is made even worse by social media. And yeah, just like that sort of hyper-capitalist situation we find ourselves in.
But yeah, that Girlboss Leviathan poem: I think I was feeling really frustrated with this sort of—I don’t know. Just things that I kept encountering in my like personal and professional life where I felt like there were women who were very powerful and very skilled, very talented, very intelligent women. And they were just appropriating patriarchal modes of power. And just exercising that and it wasn’t— It’s like, “okay cool, we’ve got a woman in power, but is it actually doing anything? Is she actually helping people or is she just reifying the structures that we already have?”
So that poem, I guess was the entryway into this wider project, which I think I’m calling Girlboss Leviathan, which traces femininity or, like, representations, I think of Western femininity from the sort of Sheryl Sandberg Lean In girlboss moments of, like, maybe the earlier twenty-tens until the present, as it keeps evolving.
Yes, I think the three modes that you discuss are girlboss, tradwife, and brat.
I did a Google Trend search and compared the three of them. And yeah, I think, I think they’re all slowly sort of coming to decline now, but there will be new tropes that replace them. And I don’t know if they’re going to be that rebellious or something. It feels like we really just have to deal with this problem where power is—Power hasn’t changed. Like maybe we don’t have a problem with patriarchy anymore to the same extent that we did in the 1950s, but we still have a problem with patriarchy and the problem is that now women are just patriarchal. So that’s really what I’m trying to get into with a lot of this stuff. But I think it’s a useful framing too, because it helps to see, like, what—
I mean if you look at social contract theory, like Hobbes who I’m specifically interested in mostly because he’s one of the first social contract theorists; also because he’s like English; he’s living through the Civil War; like, right after Charles gets beheaded; Oliver Cromwell comes in, you know, gets pretty messy in there. But this is where we sort of start to get the emergence of, like, nation states proper in Europe and in Europe, sort of Western history. Yeah, we don’t have any Holy Roman Empire after about the 1800s, I think, so, yeah, I think this idea of the nation state and the sort of discrete body that represents something else is part of this problem of autonomy, self-objectification, representation, sovereignty, like, feminine power, which is often just patriarchal power through the sort of, through a feminine representation.
Like this is not to say that they aren’t forms of feminine power; like feminine sort of governmental power that could be useful or are really useful. It’s just to say that I think the dominant representations that we have of feminine power are still quite patriarchal representations, but we can’t keep blaming patriarchy for that, because now women are doing it too, women are doing patriarchy too! So, it’s just like, “argh!”
Hobbes is important for you and for your purposes for all the reasons that you mentioned, but also he’s just been enormously influential. Because these kind of— He’s a complex thinker, but he’s received in a simple way, I think, a lot of the time, like, “oh everybody’s going to go crazy, so we have to coerce people to suppress this kind of state of nature, state of war.”
Like the problem isn’t making women respected, it’s just making people respected. I think part of the problem is, like, not to be like, “all men”, or, like, “all white people” too or whatever. But I think it’s, like— The ultimate problem, I think, maybe comes from this, where it’s like, this is stuff that William Godwin talks about: that if you have to follow a law, you’re going to end up with this kind of morality where there’s always someone higher than you, someone can always make a decision that’s going to undermine you or undermine your autonomy.
So, although I think even the idea of autonomy we need to investigate a bit, like, this idea that we don’t get the final say over what happens to us is— Yeah, I think that really is, might be where part of the problem is, because it doesn’t matter if you like— I mean, I don’t know if a lot of the people who are committing atrocities, whether that’s like proper sort of full-scale global war, genocide stuff or just – not just – but like, you know, domestic violence, family violence, people who do that sort of thing, are they do they respect themselves? Like, you have to respect humanity if you want to not hurt people in that way. But I think people who are hurting people in that way don’t really respect themselves or other people, so then it doesn’t really become a question of like, “oh we have to report we have to represent and respect these people more”. It’s, like, we just have to consider everybody human or everybody, like, worthy of life. I think that’s part of the issue.
So, I suppose. Like, yeah, I think my lens is definitely coming at it through this maybe postfeminism, maybe patriarchy – whatever you want to call it – but I think I want to come in it from that direction, firstly because I have that— That’s my positioning, I guess, but also because, yeah, this category of like women or femininity has historically been pretty fraught. And I think often we try and fix it by being like, “we’ll just right the balance,” but it’s not really a balance of women and men. It’s like people and people, you know?
What are you currently working on?
Currently I’m working on this Girlboss Leviathan project. I’ve got to turn my ASCP paper into a proper journal article, so I’ve got to incorporate some of the stuff on William Godwin and Mary Graham. Because yeah, I don’t— I just don’t really have an answer, but I have a lot of critique which I think is most people’s problem, so I have to work on the answer bit there.
I’m also writing what I think might end up being a prose novel kind of on this problem of like how do we do— How do we deal with the problems of patriarchy which women have now inherited, or like everybody’s really kind of inherited? How do we live with each other? How do we make sure we’re not hurting each other? How do we—Like, what is autonomy? You know, I’m going to have to get into that through fiction and prose and literature, I think, because, yeah, I find it really complements the scholarship at the same time.
Fantastic, that sounds great. And listeners can find links to Dr Dowden’s work and some of the artworks we’ve discussed on the Concept : Art website.
Dr Elese Dowden, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Thank you Pat.
Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
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