Can We See Sadness as a Form of Power in Roy Lichtenstein’s famous pop-art Drowning Girl?
Does the feeling of sadness, or agony refer an agency of women? Does a woman’s act of crying create an understanding beyond the normative way of seeing — the binary construction of masculinity and femininity?
What English philosopher Thomas Hobbes observed in the 17th century, has become a normative seeing about women nowadays, that is, women cry more than men because they feel powerless (Vingerhoets et al 443). Can this feeling of powerless and expression of anguish and anxiety be considered as a form of power for women or another gender who are abused and oppressed by power? These questions are aroused in my mind when I take a further peek on 1960s famous pop art Drowning Girl.
Drowning Girl is one of the most famous artworks of Roy Lichtenstein which is considered a stylistic turn from the Abstract Expressionism to the Pop art movement in 1960s America. At that time, a group of American artists choose copying object from everyday imagery, happening things like comics, commercial advertisement and transform it from the copy to the rank of an original. Roy Lichtenstein is one of the pioneers of that trend. Among others, Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, Robert Rauschenberg have established this genre of art. Lichtenstein created this painting in 1963.
This painting is a combination of words and image in which each supplement other and combinedly create visual meaning. The image depicts a girl’s face with anguish expression in motion waves with the text in comic’s panel design: “I don’t care, I ‘d rather sink than call Brad for help”.
In “A Review of My Work Since 1961- A Slide Presentation”, Roy Lichtenstein mentions that he always prefers “highly emotional subject”, but “in a very removed, technical, almost engineering drawing style” (Bader 59). To produce the emotional expression, he uses solid bold colour with thick stark border lines through the customization of Ben-Day dots technique.
In Drowning Girl, Lichtenstein uses light pink, deep and light blue, and black colour into thick, curvy lines that comprise with vivid description.
The painting shows, a light pink skin colour girl with pink lips, deep blue curly hair and black eyelashes possess diagonally into the curvy, light blue waves in the frame. This distribution of colour and lines create the sense of the main figure’s position and her surroundings that she is surrounded by wavy water. Most of the subject body is covered with water, except her face, left hand and right shoulder. The light blue and thick black colour in the curvy lines provide a gaze to the viewers that the girl is sinking. The off-centred position of the girl’s face takes all attention into the expression: lowering the eyebrow concealing the eyes, running down tears and slightly opened lips. This facial sign illustrates the message of worry, sadness, and anguish feeling. The text in the image: “I don’t care, I ‘d rather sink than call Brad for help” is solidified her feeling.
A seam of critiques has criticized this sad expression, for example, art critique John Coplans criticizes the subject of the Drowning Girl as “vulnerable”, “emotionally distressed”, “passive” woman’s emotion (23). So, what is the definition of vulnerable or passive? Aren’t these two words directly related to power? Isn’t it a normative way of seeing to notice the misery, vulnerability or passivity from the surface ground without going through a deep, striking and critical thinking?
If we look through Pulitzer winner Sylvia Plath’s writing where she engages her personal anguish, frustration, sadness, we can see those emotions are her agency against the power that caused her sadness. Likewise, Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl shows a clear NO, an agency to deny calling for help to her boyfriend (it is not mentioned in the artwork, however, it is possible to assume Brad as her boyfriend) Brad. The image shows the girl’s bold and brave nerve in that context of epinephrine.
These days I found some visual artists are breaking the normative way of thinking and seeing by questioning and reviewing classical and popular artworks. Audrey Woolen is such critique and visual artist, who juxtaposes her thinking with the traditional artworks and formulates a counterpoint of view of feminism through Instagram posts. I find, she fuses Judith Butler’s notion of gender trouble through a binary process of identity in Shulamith Firestone’s thought “a revolutionary in every bedroom” in developing her Sad Girl theory.
By breaking the traditional feminist view of strong and weak women, Woolen argues that sadness or anguish or self-destructive activities and expressions are not the results of personal failure or passiveness; instead, it represents a form of power, an agency, a resistance, a political act that can ultimately lead women to be united (Tongco “Meet Audrey Woolen”). For her, history, pop culture and mythology are full of sad girls, but seeing “sad” as passive and weak has been dismissed their role from the history of activism.
So, activism doesn’t refer always bodily activities on the street or social media, activism can also happen through thinking by which a difference can produce. This different perspective of activity and agency of women has harnessed a difference in me towards looking at the Drowning Girl.
Work Cited:
Bader, Graham. October Files Roy Lichtenstein. Cambridge. London: The MIT Press, 2009
Coplans, John. Roy Lichtenstein, Praeger Publishers. 1972
Tongco,Tricia. “Meet Audrey Wollen/ The Feminist Art Star Staging A Revolution On Instagram”, Huffpost.com. 12th April 2015. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/audrey-wollen-the-feminist-art-star-staging-a-revolution-on-instagram_n_5660dddde4b079b2818e0993?guccounter=1
Vingerhoets, Ad et al. “Crying a Biopsychosocial Phenomenon”. Tear in the Graeco-Roman World, edited by Fogen T. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter