Re-occupying the Erotic Body: The Paintings and “Performance” of Pauline Boty, British Pop Artist (1938-66)
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Pauline Boty (1938-66), colleague of David Hockney and Peter Blake, was one of the few women artists to engage with Pop Art. She found a visual language to picture a female erotic imagination despite working within a genre that has been castigated for objectifying and reifying the sexual woman. She posed naked with her own work and performed a knowingly sexualised, popular culture construction of artistic identity. In so doing, she aimed to collapse the binary opposition between “sexual woman” and “serious artist.” This transgressive and innovatory practice had no discursive resonance at the time and has, until recently, been marginalised or excluded from both mainstream Pop and feminist art history. Second wave feminist art theory only validated women’s work that subverted mass cultural imagery but this imperative to subvert means a denial of the real pleasures experienced by women, leaving them as tenants in bodies that signify only sexuality for men. Changed discursive and historical circumstances now allow a re-evaluation of feminist understandings. Boty’s practice provides a model of how the erotic body might be re-occupied that has great relevance to current debates.