The Evident Elbow

In an exhibition entitled “The Visible Vagina” that opens simultaneously at the David Nolan Gallery and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York on January 28th, the art world proves itself sadly behind the curve. According to the exhibition press release, “the goal of this exhibition is to remove [the] prurient connotations, implicit even in works of art, ever since the pudendum was prudishly covered by a fig leaf.” There are dozens of vagina-outing artists in the show, ranging from Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picasso through Judy Chicago, John Currin, and Jeff Koons.

Hello? Don’t these curators know the fig leaf fell off a long time ago? Don’t they ever surf the Web? Don’t they know that practically every community theater in the country now puts on yearly performances of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues? Haven’t they heard of V-day celebrations? Don’t they know that high-school kids now calmly stare at anatomical images of the vagina, along with the penis and anus, in sex-ed classes, and can say these words, without fainting, out loud? The vagina is passé. Kaput. Like its deconstructing curators, the vagina, along with the penis and anus, have devolved into mere socially constructed concepts.

While some in the art world still can’t shake the vagina, the hippest artists have moved on to the elbow. Following evolutionary psychology’s recent discoveries of the critical role the elbow has played in sexual selection, young “elbowists,” as they are called, are making astonishing art that both celebrates and deconstructs this hitherto repressed subject.

Recently, I contacted Ellie Bow (who changed her name just this year from the antiquated “Vera Vulva”), a leading artist in Elbowism and one of the curators of the upcoming exhibition, “The Evident Elbow.” (By coincidence, this exhibition also opens on January 28th — just around the bend from “The Visible Vagina,” in Post-Post-Traditional Body Parts Project Space). I asked Ms. Bow to explain just what makes the elbow so timely.

She said, “Until now, the elbow has been entirely hidden from view in art. Why? Ignorance and patriarchal power structures, that’s why — not to mention the failure of artists to keep with what’s going on in science. The elbow is an astonishing collection of bones that work together as a community. It carries multiple meanings that cut across gender and race. In constructing false dichotomies that marginalize the elbow as ‘the other,’ we’ve relegated it to an object of loathing and contempt. By failing to acknowledge the critical role the elbow has played in survival, perception and language, people deny the elbow its inherent dignity.”

Ms. Bow continued, “Some of the blame lies with the medical profession, which has medicalized the elbow. Instead of being embraced and accepted for what it is, the elbow is discussed almost entirely in terms of ‘epicondylitis’ [tendinitis of the elbow]. Sadly, doctors, have turned this utterly natural body part into a medical problem.”

In the past, people have willfully leaned on the elbow, neglected to apply creams to it (to the point where it gets all crusty and gross), allowed it to fill up with boo-boos, and broken it right and left. The elbow has been given little elbow room, and almost without exception, people are ashamed to talk about it. (Éric Rohmer, after all, didn’t make a film called Claire’s Elbow.) Novelists and poets have been especially remiss in this respect. They’re always rushing from the wrist to the arm and then straight up to the shoulder, never once stopping to consider the wonders of the elbow. Shakespeare, of course, is a great exception, honoring the elbow in Measure for Measure by actually naming a character “Elbow.” It was a tragedy that Sonnet #155 was tossed in the trash, leaving behind only the famous two-line fragment of what must have been a truly tender rumination on the nature of this wonderful joint:

    Be wise as thou art cruel, do not press
    My elbow-tied patience with too much disdain…

Tolstoy was another rare author who recognized the profound meaning lurking in the elbow. After reading Pushkin, he experienced what he called a “fleeting daydream of a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow.” (That’s Anna Karenina’s elbow he’s talking about.) This was a man truly ahead of his time.

Yet for Elbowist purists, Tolstoy remains deeply problematic. He was, naturally, terribly constrained by his times (see Laurie Fendrich’s unpublished thesis, “Call to Arms: Tolstoy’s Hidden Obsession with Anna’s Erotic Elbow”). Unfortunately, after his initial enthusiasm for the elbow, Tolstoy seems to have grown ashamed of himself, and proceeded to write all of Anna Karenina by going on and on about Anna’s face, breasts, and shoulders without once returning to the elbow. Sure, he also neglected to write about either Anna’s vagina, or Count Vronsky’s penis, but those omissions have been more than filled by the array of traditional artists who populate “The Visible Vagina.” Even Homer, the greatest of all poets, disappoints. If he hadn’t been one of those typical ancient Greeks crippled by the male patriarchal obsession with a woman’s face, he could have freely given us the thunderingly powerful line, “The elbow that launched a thousand ships.”

By finally taking the elbow out of the sleeve that perpetually hides it in Western-imposed concepts of shame and ugliness, “The Evident Elbow” will force the viewer to confront the elbow. The day is not far away when a museum such as the Whitney Museum of Art will prominently display images of the elbow alongside labial paintings by Georgia O’Keefe.

Camille Paglia, among others, has pointed out (to what ought to be the chagrin of all vagina-outers) that people who make art about the vagina are all so very mixed up about female anatomy. It was the pudendum Picasso loved, everybody, not the vagina. Vaginas require considerable awkward maneuvering, and sometimes even a mirror and a flashlight, to actually see. The elbow, on the other hand, requires nothing but a gentle lifting of the arm to become the object of our admiring gaze. With this groundbreaking exhibition, the elbow has finally become the crux of the post-postmodernist cultural discourse—the position it so rightly deserves.