Joan Semmel, Mythologies, and Me by Alexa Donovan

I recently made an X account. I have been heavily limiting my social media usage for over a year now and have found the absence of scrolling to be quite refreshing. But if I’m being honest, my brain-rotting tendencies have not entirely disappeared, and I probably wanted the front-row seat to some reality TV drama unfolding in real time. 

I no longer have the said X account, mostly because I found the algorithm to be truly berserk. When I opened the platform for the first time, before even searching anything, my homepage alternated mostly between two types of posts: porn videos and incel rants. I guess it's not really that easy to differentiate between all of this content, because much of it overlaps. What I mean to say is that a woman was either being praised and objectified for her perfect, sexy body, or she was being ripped apart by commenters. Often both happened at once. 

An in-depth analysis of internet misogyny, pornography, and objectification is not my objective here, but regardless, oscillating between “sexy girl” content and “women are disgusting, and I hate them” content reminded me of a Joan Semmel painting that I was truly struck by months ago. 

Semmel’s 1976 oil and collage triptych, Mythologies and Me, posits her true, subjective self as being wedged between these two primary representations of femaleness. On the left-hand side of Semmel’s nude body, painted from her point of view, is a parody of a highly pornographic image of a faceless woman. On the right is a satirical recreation of one of Willem de Kooning’s abstract expressionist women, her body maimed by painterly marks and her smile menacing. 

As patrons/prisoners of visual culture, we have consistently reinvented the wheel. Before Instagram models, Pornhub, and incels, there were caryatids, sexualized venuses, and abstract interpretations of cut-apart women. Female sexuality was something to be feared—think of sirens—but also something to be conquered—think of the Sabine women. To be a female artistic subject, it is often either to be a beautiful prize or a haggard witch. Unsurprisingly for the 1970s, Semmel’s canvas is instead centering the real, breathing woman in the middle of all of this madness.

Of course this is generalizing the canon. There are no doubt plenty of outliers to these cases. Where Semmel’s work particularly intrigues me, and I think attempts to rectify this problem in a very head-on fashion, is the positioning of herself between these two modes of representation, and particularly from the point of view of looking down at her own body, which is strikingly realistic (both from a painterly lens but also through her inclusion of bodily details which are often airbrushed out). 

Semmel’s inclusion of herself from her own point of view grants her agency and subjectivity. As the object, subject, and creator of the work, she is breaking herself out of the mold —the prize or the witch—which were forced upon her and other women for centuries. With Mythologies, Semmel attempts to answer the question that women have been asking for ages when viewing female representations in material culture: how do I, as a human being, fit into these “mythologies” of female sexuality when the stories and images are so restrictive?

Semmel answers with her middle canvas, as she stares down at her bare self, her breasts beholden to gravity and her body relaxed. The message here is to just be, to not place inherent value upon one’s own flesh. By taking on her own image, Semmel gives us the truth of her body without any subversive styling nor a performance. This, to me, is the most groundbreaking aspect of the work because the categorization of Semmel’s body comes from within her rather than outside of her. 

In an essay published in an Alexander Gray Associates monograph, Semmel writes that upon moving back to the United States from Spain, she was “looking for the ‘sexual revolution’ and instead found sexual commercialization that mostly showed female bodies for sale. I wanted to find an erotic visual language that would speak to women.” 

This quote hits the nail on the head, at least for me, because my female identity and understanding of my own body, at its core, does not resonate with the left panel nor the right panel. Those are performances ascribed to us by others rather than true states of being. Meanwhile, the truthful language of imperfection and the first-person point of view in her work speak to how I’ve come to understand my own body. 

I will be the least unique woman in the world to proclaim that I too have been (and often still am) insecure about my looks in one way or another. I remember sitting in my bed during the pandemic and looking through the TikTok following of some of the (shameless) boys that I knew as a sort of teenage-girl-coming-of-age torture ritual. While I watched heavily-filtered women dance in bikinis and scrolled through the comments, which both praised and slut shamed these girls, I often compared my own beauty to theirs, coming out of the exercise with nothing but bad feelings for my own flesh. Either these girls were too much or not enough. I simply wanted the ventricle for my soul to disappear, wishing for a peaceful existence without feeling caged within myself. 

Years later, I view myself quite differently than I did as a teenager, and most of that has to do with an exercise similar to what we are viewing in Semmel’s painting. I looked down at myself. I looked in the mirror often. I stopped looking outward and started to understand that the truth of my body came from my own two eyes interrogating myself rather than using external parameters to ascribe value. My body, like Semmel’s, just is. It takes care of me and brings me through the day. Sometimes it looks good, sometimes it looks bad. It’s always floating in the liminal space of the social expectations of what it should be and what it is mythologized to be, but at the end of the day it will always just be what it truly is when I look down.