Eunice Golden
Shifting The Gaze
Image Courtesy of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery. Photography: Walter Weissman.
“I began working with the male nude because I was bored with the female nude. I longed to incorporate my own erotic fantasies in my work.”
– Eunice Golden
For over 9 decades, Eunice Golden has dared to question and to shift the gaze… to embrace her full self and follow her passions. Refusing to disappear into societal expectations, she has forged her own way and earned an important spot in art history. In doing so, she has been censored, shamed, and now very deservingly celebrated.
If anyone asks, I think I’d like to be just like her when I grow up.
Image Courtesy of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery
Eunice Golden: Metamorphosis (Exhibition View)
Elizabeth Mathis Cheatham: In a 2016 interview with Gail Levin, you stated, "I never thought of myself as a revolutionist or a heretic. I just did what I felt I had to do without the intent of being radical." What was it that felt so crucial to you personally and for the times about the art and the work you were doing?
Eunice Golden: In the mid-sixties as a figurative expressionist painter, photographer, and filmmaker, I began working with the male nude because I was bored with the female nude. I longed to incorporate my own erotic fantasies in my work. The female nude for centuries has been the object of male needs, fantasies, and desires, so what would be more natural than for me to work with the male image that would reflect a heterosexual woman's perspective? In my then stifling role of wife and mother, I was struggling to redefine myself and to reevaluate my role as a woman artist in society. While other women artists portrayed the female body, often their own genitalia as an emblem of their own power, I wanted to go beyond that to find my own path, to challenge the entrenched ideologies and morals of the society. I wanted to challenge the arts’ historical bias against the male nude as a subject for women artists. So I began to utilize the scene of the male landscape, which was a metaphor. The male landscape was a metaphor for how I perceived the male and the environment which immediately surrounded me and the society in which we lived, where women's needs were suppressed, where the male was dominant in every aspect of life from the home to the workplace.
The male landscape was an image that also reflected my female eroticism and this created a conflict in my emotions, which then created a tension and an ambiguity in my work. That's very important. The work of the male landscape evoked many layers of meaning, as it was cast in an infinite space on a large scale, where distance was eliminated and the viewer was enveloped in its visceral power, which may in some cases have caused the viewer to make an identification with some of these aspects. My signature image of the male landscape, called Landscape #160, was created in 1972 in East Hampton and is now in a collection at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton. This image depicts a male torso with legs apart revealing his well-formed genitals with an erect penis. The images, both intimate and colossal, manifest a powerful erotic force, and it also reflects vulnerability. It is this dichotomy which has engendered dialogue and controversy. And it was exhibited in the Whitney exhibition, Nothing But Nudes, in 1977. In 2002, it was exhibited in the Guild Hall Museum exhibition called Personal & Political. In 2009, it became a part of the Guild Hall Museum’s Permanent Collection. So I drew and painted hundreds of male landscapes. I worked with the male nude in photography and film as well. You may not be familiar with my photography and a film called Blue Bananas and Other Meats.
EMC: I watched Blue Bananas and I loved it! As for your photography, I especially enjoyed Untitled of the man and woman lying on the beach… Sorry. I interrupted you. But I have been able to see some of your video and photography. Please go ahead.
EG: Good. I drew and I painted hundreds of male landscapes. I worked with the male nude in photography and film. Needless to say, I attracted much media attention and critical review in the art press. But they were also censored by many museums and galleries who would often make excuses for not displaying them. Are you familiar with the art historian Richard Meyer?
EMC: Yes, I am.
EG: Have you read his catalogue essay for the exhibition of MOCA Los Angeles—the show was called WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution?
EMC: No, but I need to!
EG: It is a very important catalogue. It's a book, really, about that show. Again, it's called WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. It happened in MOCA Los Angeles in 2007. Anyway, I was excluded from the show as some other prominent artists—female artists—were. So he [Richard Meyer] wrote this essay, and it's a very important one. In his essay, he traced the dialogue between creative expression and its erasure, between sexualization of the male body and its suppression and wrote about my work. “Golden combined a critique of male-oriented culture with a frank acknowledgement of her own desires to the male body.” In discussing my photographic work, he said, "Golden shifted the terms of artistic control in ways that exceed the limits of simple role reversal. Golden's photoworks mark a significant intervention in American conceptual and body art of the 1970s." So that was by a historian in the catalogue WACK!. Now, I have to tell you about Harold Rosenberg because this is also about censorship.
EMC: Yes, please.
EG: Firstly, Harold Rosenberg was a noted art historian and critic. Here in East Hampton where I was—I began to come here in 1970. There's a beach called Louse Point, a very beautiful, beautiful beach where artists and critics used to hang out. One of the critics was Harold Rosenberg. I would be on a blanket with Harold Rosenberg and Saul Steinberg—you know the artist Saul Steinberg?
EMC: Yes.
EG: And one day, he asked me why I painted the erect penis in so much of the work. And I replied that I never asked my models how to pose, but just to be natural. Although there was no overt sexual exchange, this became an exciting mutual experience, reversing the roles of the artist and model for many of my subjects. Sometimes models' penises became erect, and I drew fast and furiously to capture the moment. So that's why a lot of my drawings have the erect penis in them. That's really important.
EMC: In addition to some people objecting to you painting the erect penis, the fact that you chose to omit many of the men's heads was also an issue for some. Linda Nochlin, I believe, was one such person. Will you speak to this and why you made that choice?
EG: Sure. Linda Nochlin was upset about that, but Linda Nochlin was a 19th century art historian. So traditionally, she would think that a drawing of a model should have a head, but I was using the metaphor of the male figure. It was a metaphor. It was not a portrait of an individual person at all. In that case, why would I show a head, when it was not a portrait, it was a landscape? The whole idea of the landscape has many meanings, but definitely was not a portrait, and that's why the heads were eliminated.
Image Courtesy of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery
Landscape #160
Eunice Golden
“All of a sudden now, some women were looking at men in the same way that men had always looked at women for centuries.”
– Eunice Golden
EMC: While you may not have seen yourself as radical, many people did, and your career suffered from it. What was it that you think people found so threatening about your work with the male nude? Was it that you had finally shifted the erotic gaze onto the male form, or that such a gaze acknowledged that women were in fact erotic creatures with their own needs and fantasies? You also mentioned just a little while ago that you think that one thing that was really hard for people—if I understood you correctly—was the dialogue you created between eroticism and vulnerability. Will you speak more to that and help me understand that more?
EG: Well, as you know, for centuries, men used the female nudes to express their fantasies and needs. But they did not appreciate—first of all, I should start with women artists at that time, in the ’60s, were excluded from galleries and museums. All of a sudden now, some women were looking at men in the same way that men had always looked at women for centuries. Men were feeling, therefore, from this gaze quite vulnerable because of the female gaze. It made them feel embarrassed, uncovered, and exposed. They were never put in that position of being looked at in the way that now women were focusing their attention. They were being the voyeurs, they were being what the men had been for centuries, and of course, men felt very uncomfortable with that.
Some of the things that I think men identify with when they look at the figure with an erect penis is when they identify—they may make the comparison with their own penis. Also, fears of castration. I know this from an experience where an art dealer wanted to give me a show and sent his partner to my studio in New York. This goes back to the ’60s. My studio is one room, so there's a bed and other things there. Above the bed, there was a painting of Cronus, actually. He got very upset, and he said, "Why did you paint the penis like a snake?" I said, "I didn't do that. I painted it like a flower." But he was so upset that he cursed me and left the studio, and as he was going out, he said, "Why don't you invite another gallery to come and go down on them at the door?" He was so obnoxious, and I was so taken aback. And of course, I didn't have the show because that was the partner of the man who owned the gallery. Isn't it amazing?
EMC: I'm so sorry that that happened. That’s crazy. When I hear you talk about this—You referenced this idea that your work serves as a mirror of other people's insecurities.
EG: Exactly. Very good analogy.
EMC: You have referenced the fact that people read into your work the theme of castration, especially if you used red.
EG: Right. When I did lectures all over the country, a question would come up frequently, for example, ‘What does this red mean? Is that blood?’ And again, the association with castration. So people did express their own feelings, but that's their own identity, often. I'm happy that my work has that many layers of meaning and means different things to different people.
EMC: Still today, and I imagine even more so then, women are taught that they need to suppress their erotism. Did you come in contact with women who pushed back against your work as much as the men?
EG: Oh, absolutely! Women always worked within the framework of a male society, where the male was always dominant and women were suppressed. Women did not have a voice, you know? They accepted this and—Look at the "Me Too" movement and how it took so many years for these women to come out and tell about their stories about men raping them. Can you imagine what women went through? They had to just shut up. If they were raped, they wouldn't even go home and tell their mothers about it. Now, women were beginning to express themselves, and it was an explosion in every discipline in the 1960s. And about women’s sexuality—women were not supposed to have sexuality. The men were supposed to have their pleasure. Critics and curators and museums and all—that's also why my work was censored. Because even if they felt privately that the work was great and should be shown and so forth, they too were working within the framework that was traditionally a framework which suppressed women's voice.
Image Courtesy of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery
Eunice Golden: Metamorphosis (Exhibition View)
EMC: In your essay for Heresies you spoke to this when you wrote ”censorship is a rape of the mind and the soul." That is so eloquently said. While it is still an uneven playing field, there have been some shifts for women. In 2019, your work was included in an internationally acclaimed exhibition, In the Cut: The Male Body in Feminist Art, and just recently you had a beautiful show with SAPAR Contemporary curated by Dr. Aliza Edelman. After six decades, do you feel like the world might finally be ready for your work?
EG: I guess you'd have to ask the world that! I think that my work made an impact on the culture and on sexual attitudes. I don't know if the world is ready for it, but in intellectual circles, especially now, I think people are very much interested in feminist thought and feminist work. Matter of fact, I had a candidate for a PhD in France come and visit me to talk about censorship, because he was writing a book about Louise Bourgeois and he wanted to include my thoughts about her. So he went to the Smithsonian and he looked up files about my work and so forth. In certain circles, people are open to discussing all the things that we are discussing now. But generally, the image of the male nude is still very much taboo.
EMC: That's true.
EG: And especially the erect penis, cause that is so very personal.
EMC: And discussing female desire still often feels taboo.
EG: I wanna ask you then, do you ever talk about these matters?
EMC: I was not taught to speak about these things—actually, I was taught not to speak of them. However, I feel it is incredibly important for women to connect with their sexuality, so I am learning to discuss such matters. I definitely still blush sometimes though. While we have discussed push back and censorship, I should also point out that you were/are very well-respected by critics and writers. I so enjoyed learning that you were one of the three artists in Linda Nochlin's first class on the male nude. It was you, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh. Is that right?
EG: I met Linda Nochlin at a friend's house here in East Hampton. Miriam Shapiro was there with Linda Nochlin. We had a discussion about women and where women were going at that time. Linda came up with the question, "Why aren't women doing the male nudes? Or why aren't there any male nudes done by women?" I had come with my portfolio and I showed a photograph of my work. I had been doing that for ten years prior to her asking that question. She was amazed. She was teaching at Vassar at the time, and she sent one of her students to my studio. I showed her the different media that I was working with, including film and photography. Then Linda was writing to establish a syllabus about the male nude, and so she included myself, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh in that syllabus. I wish I had—I believe that Aliza from the gallery was trying to find that.
EMC: That would be so amazing.
EG: And Linda's gone, you know. We don't have the syllabus itself and how it was taught, but it was called the Male Nude in Women's Art, something like that.
EMC: I would have loved to have been a part of that class! We've spent a lot of time talking about your male nudes and why they are so important, but you have many incredible bodies of work. Within your latest show, Metamorphosis, there were so many beautiful pieces.
EG: Thank you.
EMC: I especially adored Study of Metamorphosis #14. I wish I could have seen the exhibit in person. Even just seeing the pictures, your blues are just breathtaking. Yet the piece I find myself returning to again and again is Stasis. Perhaps it’s because I read a lot of movement in it, which feels a little scandalous due to the name, or its slight Asian feel that draws me in. Really, I just find the piece quite magical.
EG: I'm looking at it now. I think this is a spiritual painting. The circle itself is something that is used in many, many cultures to express many things. For me, it's about evolution. It's about the movement of life within a contained environment. The beginning and the end of one's life, or the coming full circle in one's career. It's about things floating around. It's about the planet, the environment. I use words sometimes as titles that are opposite to what the object really is. Stasis is really the blockage of movement. This is about movement. When you think about a circle, you can spin it and it can spin at various speeds, or you can stop it entirely. So it has many, many meanings. The life in this painting happens to be sea life and seaweed, you know. That's what you're looking at. It could be about life in general, life on the planet. So it can have many, many interpretations. All of my work has many interpretations; different people experience different things. It has many layers. I'm an intuitive painter, so I don't sit down and say, "I'm gonna paint about this." It just sort of happens. I'm in that space. Whatever happens comes out through my hands, with my brush. I'm not aware of it. I'm really in another space when I'm painting. Often, I'm surprised at what I see at the end!
Image Courtesy of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery
Metamorphisis #14
Eunice Golden
Image Courtesy of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery
Stasis
Eunice Golden
EMC: You once wrote, "As an artist, I took my human concerns into the studio. I needed imagery that permitted me to explore what I was feeling as a woman and as an artist.” We've discussed a lot around people's response to your work, as well as why from a cultural standpoint it was really important. Within this quote, I read, too, that your art was a place that you brought things that were happening in your own personal life into the studio, and in the studio, you worked through some of those. Was art a place for you that you could bring your struggles? I read something about when you started doing your male landscapes, you were a mother and you were in a marriage where you were struggling. I imagine, at times, that may have been lonely. I know that when I had my first son I had a really hard time. I felt like all of my friends were talking about how great it was to be a mom and to be home, and I was bored out of my mind. I didn't feel like I had peers to discuss some of the things that were coming up for me, and I wonder if you felt that way too, in a culture where people were probably talking even less about things like that.
EG: Well, you know, this was a period where there were tensions in my marriage, and I began to question my role as a woman, as a wife, as a mother. I felt stifled in that role because my husband did not support my work. And yet, I loved my husband, and I had erotic needs as a healthy, sexual, heterosexual woman. So there was a conflict between my erotic needs and my views on male behavior. Those are the thoughts that made me want to ask questions, like 'What am I doing here? What is my role in the family? What is my role in the society? What can I do to express myself as a woman with all these feelings? How do I really feel about men? Do I hate men?’ No, I don't hate men, but I critique their behavior when it's harmful, when it's disturbing to others, not just women. Look at what's going on in the world. My husband was not violent, but he was very, very critical of everything I did because I spent a lot of time doing my work. Maybe he felt he wasn't getting enough attention, I don't know. That was not my problem because I think I was a good mother and a good wife, but I had needs of my own. I had an intellect, and I was very curious about finding answers to my questions. So these are all things that I brought into my studio.
Image Courtesy of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery
Untitled with Text 1973
Eunice Golden
“My juices are in the sowing and the harvest as my breath is the air I breathe recycled; my blood beats like the sun, my sweat and tears cool me and I am the sum of infinite particles, stars and changing constants. My form is woven into the tapestry, your form is interchangeable with mine and all others and has no name.”
– Eunice Golden
EMC: There is a lot of courage within your work and within your commitment to create a life that worked for you vs what you were told you were supposed to want. Where did that courage come from? Were you just born with it? Did you cultivate it? Did you feel that courage, or was it super scary and you just did it anyway?
EG: My mom told me that from the time I was one year old, I spoke whole sentences. I had an insatiable curiosity and asked why about everything. I wasn't worried about what people thought—that wasn't my responsibility. I was many times in Honors classes in English when I was growing up. One day, the teacher, as they usually do, had every row stand up and say, “What do you want to be later in life?” And people said, "I want to be a firemen." "I want to be a teacher." "I want to be a policeman," whatever. When I got up, I just blurted out, "I want to make a contribution!" I did not know—I think I was fifteen, and I did not know what contribution or anything. I just blurted it out. I guess I was intellectually inclined; I guess I was gifted. My parents didn't understand that, so I was restricted from doing a lot of things. But I continued to explore in my curiosity, and I'm still doing that at almost 94. I'm gonna have a birthday in a few days.
EMC: Are you? Happy birthday!
EG: Thank you! I'm still, as they say, “sharp as a tack.”
EMC: You are! Absolutely.
EG: You know, my work goes back sixty years, and there's so much in my life that I've experienced. I've been through World War II, and I've been through all the other wars that've followed. I've had a long life. I've lived through the civil rights movements and it was a wonderful time in my life in the ’60s and ’70s, because there were a lot of questions to be asked. I really felt part of it. I'm so glad that I was alive during that, and I'm so glad that I'm alive today to be able to address injustice. It's a great time to be alive!