hieroglyphs in the wilderness

A few weeks ago I visited Kiyoshi Awazu's wonderful retrospective, Re-Reproduction, at the Kawasaki City Museum. Ever since I saw Awazu's graphic design work for the first time, I have been intrigued by his fixation on two ambiguous female faces, which he has endlessly reproduced and, at times, juxtaposed: Leonardo's Mona Lisa and the (in)famous Sada Abe. To those unfamiliar with the latter: in the mid-1930s, Sada erotically asphyxiated her lover, Kichizo Ishida, during one of their sex marathons, and then cut off his penis and testicles, carrying them around in her handbag for a couple of days, until she turned herself down to the the police in Tokyo. The story became known in the West through Nagisa Oshima's film version Ai no Korida / In the Realm of the Senses (No Império dos Sentidos, in Portuguese), even though the story has been the object of various other film adaptations in Japan.
Reverting to Awazu (and to the artists and philosophers who have been interested in both myths, for that matter): what might explain such male fascination with the blank, ungraspable facial expressions of these female sexual personae?

Once again, Camille Paglia suggests a provocative line of interpretation. A feminist with brass balls, no doubt!


Leonardo's Mona Lisa is the premiere sexual persona of western art. She is the Renaissance Nefertiti, eternally watching. She is unnervingly placid. The most beautiful woman, making herself a perfect stillness, will always turn Gorgon. I spoke of the Mona Lisa as Leonardo's apotropaion, his household charm of warding-off [evil]. She is an ambassador from primeval times, when earth was a desert inhospitable to man. She presides over a landscape of raw rock and water. The distant river's snaky meander is the elusiveness of her cold daemonic heart. Her figure is a stable female delta, a perceptual pyramid topped with the mystic eye. But the background is deceptive and incoherent. The mismatched horizon lines, which one rarely notices at first, are subliminally disorienting. They are the unbalanced scales of an archetypal world without law or justice. Mona Lisa's famous smile is a thin mouth receding into shadow. Her expression, like her puffy eyes, is hooded. The egglike headwith its enormous plucked brow seems to pillow on the abundant, self-embraced Italian bosom. What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. She is Zeus, Leda, and egg rolled into one, another hermaphrodite deity pleasuring herself into mere being. Walter Pater is to call her a "vampire", coasting through history on her secret tasks. Despite many satires, the Mona Lisa will remain the world's most famous painting. Supreme western works of art [...] preserve their indeterminacy through all interpretation. They are morally ungraspable. Even the Venus de Milo gained everything by losing her arms. Mona Lisa looks through us and passively accepts our admiration as her due. Some say she is pregnant. If so, she radiates the solipsism of woman gloating over her own creation. The picture combines fleshy amplitude, emotional obliqueness, and earthly devastation. Leonardo has drawn mother nature from life.
[...]
Mona Lisa's ambiguous smile is a hieroglyph symbolizing the link between Leonardo's sexual personae and their enshrouding atmosphere, a strange light which is their own stormy inner weather. [...] So Leonardo's smile is androgynous, a sexual hex sign.
[...]
Freud traces the mysterious smile to Leonardo's buried memory of the lost biological mother preceding his adoptive mother, the two women of The Virgin with St. Anne. Freud connects the painting to Leonardo's childhood dream of a bird of prey, the hermaphroditic Egyptian vulture goddess. [...] I trace the smile all the way back through Botticelli to Donatello and find it amoral, solipsistic and gender-crossing from the start.
[...]
But as the grotesque landscape shows, this is no celebration of female power. Like Michelangelo, Leonardo finds the condition of male servitude intolerable, and rightly so.


Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 154-56.

Image source for Kiyoshi Awazu's Portrait of a Woman (1977): the website of the 21st Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan.