Theresa Kishkan, The Art of Looking Back

Let me do the thumbnail first, because I've enough to say that frontloading the reviewiest bit about Theresa Kishkan's The Art of Looking Back: A Painter, an Obsession, and Reclaiming the Gaze is the only way that readers won't give up long before getting to the end of this post.

• 
  If you've read anything by Theresa Kishkan before, even if you don't have a blog like mine whose only author-specific label is for her name, this book is essential reading.
• Kishkan's memoir about the lifelong consequences for her of being briefly a nude model for painter Jack Wilkinson should be read attentively by anyone whose reading interests (or indeed political or cultural interests) connect with any element of that description.
• The Art of Looking Back will take you to unexpected places, and that's a very good thing. Although this memoir's author is thinking very hard indeed here about herself and her own history (and future), it's also grounded in philosophic discourse about being a painter's model or subject. Certainly I've never read a memoir that so comfortably works through some of Julia Kristeva's ideas, for example, and I've come away with a better sense of Kristeva's prickly thinking on these kinds of subjects.
• All things considered, this is a stunning work of self-analysis, contextual thinking, and BC cultural history, and I hope that it gets many more readers than Kishkan's usually does.

Looking, and Being Looked At

Men look, and when they look, they look in different ways and with different impacts than do other people. That's been a hallmark of feminist theory for decades, as well as of film theory (see Laura Mulvey, foundationally) and art history (see John Berger and Susanne Kappeler, among ever so many others). When we're dealing with the story of how a 23-year-old woman was looked at in the nude by an older male painter in the mid-1970s, a story being told 45 years later by the same woman, it's both crucial and inevitable that we'll be dealing with those ideas.

As Kishkan articulates in The Art of Looking Back, with the help of Kristeva and Annette Kämmerer and others, especially those who've also modelled nude for painters who may or may not have deserved them, this kind of gaze is acquisitive. It's understood by the man looking as the guarantor of an ongoing entitlement, as if the ability to look once endows one with an ongoing right to keep looking, to grant others the power to look in the same way, and to translate the looking into other forms of action. That's kind of what painting means, especially if it's practiced without careful ethics, and it's not that different from how men look at women generally.

In the case of Theresa Kishkan and Jack Wilkinson, he took his brief looking at the 23-year-old Kishkan as authorization to remain obsessively, oppressively present in Kishkan's life for most of the next 20-plus years. He wrote to her regularly and at length; visited her with and without invitation; sought to bond with her husband, the poet John Pass; and assumed a virtually permanent right of access. Over lunch at a restaurant in the 1980s, for example, during which Kishkan needed to breast-feed her child, Wilkinson chose to draw an eroticized version of the moment. When Kishkan left Victoria to travel, not too long after she modelled for him, Wilkinson drew up a limited-edition folio of nude drawings featuring Kishkan that he sold and gave to people who knew her.

Writing as a man myself, I'd say that Wilkinson would've felt that he was remaining available just in case Kishkan wanted to act on his desires; Kishkan makes it clear that these weren't in any way her desires, but that wouldn't have been relevant to Wilkinson, and probably he wouldn't have cared very much about that. Wilkinson likely would've felt that he was acting in a relatively gentlemanly way, in that he was remaining aggressively available rather than directly forcing himself on her, but if so, this must only be understood as a marker of how unthinking is the male sense of entitlement to women (and to women's bodies in particular). Writing to Kishkan about the folio of nude drawings he planned to share, noted above: "By the time you get back to Victoria, if you ever do return, you will probably be quite well known, every inch of you" (Wilkinson, qtd. on p.175). Violation comes in many forms, after all.

To her credit, Kishkan extends her reflections on this overt, aggressive sexist looking to the variously weaker forms of sexist looking that would've been the water she was swimming in at the time. Wilkinson shared drawings of her with some of Kishkan's older male friends and mentors, for example, such as Robin Skelton and Dick Morriss, and it seems likely to me that he would have had sought to chat quite pruriently about her. The writing community in Canada and elsewhere in the 1960s through 1980s are littered with affairs happy and unhappy, with abuses of power, and with more or less predatory relationships; none of these were Kishkan's fate, exactly, but as I say, that's the water she was swimming in, and she spends some valuable time here reflecting on that.

Looking at Oneself's Being Looked At 

A tricky element for me, in responding to The Art of Looking Back, is the question of my own position. In the dynamic between Wilkinson and Kishkan that she so carefully explores here, my subject position is vastly closer to his than to hers. As a white man in my 50s who therefore came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, my knowledge of her gendered experiences isn't going to be a fully embodied knowledge.

As a result, I've found myself struggling with how to respond to Kishkan's sense of her responsibility toward Wilkinson and his family. After all, Wilkinson was married when he painted her, and remained married for many years afterward. When Wilkinson painted Kishkan, he had only recently stopped painting nudes of his daughter, who had just turned 18 and looked very much like Kishkan herself, and Kishkan reports that there were rumours and innuendo about whether his relationship with his daughter was altogether proper.

It's entirely appropriate, obviously, that Kishkan's feelings about all this would be complicated. At one point, though, she remarks that she is ashamed now that she "took so little care of his wife's feelings" (p128). Earlier, she shares what she characterizes as a realization about her own responsibility: "I was much more complicit in the difficulties with a marriage, a family ... than I cared then to acknowledge" (p33). She allowed Jack to squire her about, mostly, taking her to lunch and on drives and to beaches for picnics. She thought that she recognized Jack's feelings without encouraging them, but looking back, she blames herself (not entirely or only, but she does blame herself!) for not quashing his feelings.

And no.

Jack Wilkinson, like every obsessed man, which at some point and to some extent is almost all of us men, was solely responsible for his feelings. A married man in his 50s obsessively courting a woman in her early 20s who isn't returning his indications of affection: under no circumstances should she be held accountable for his unrequited feelings.

Early in the book, Kishkan writes a little obliquely about her own bad behaviour with a friend who was in a relationship. My assumption is that she's extending her fairly justified self-criticism there into her situation with Wilkinson, but those aren't the same things. She also writes about being mystified that one of her friends willingly set up her boyfriend (the friend's, not Kishkan's) to sleep with another friend of theirs. People in their 20s in the early 1970s were living with complicated sexual politics, is what I'm saying. That's not Jack Wilkinson, so no.

Should she have been more mindful of the impact on Marie Wilkinson, of letting herself be squired about by Jack? (If she could have stopped him without cost and risk, of course, which is doubtful.) Perhaps. I can see her wishing that she'd been able to do that, and I can see how fellow feeling among women would've factored into the sexual politics of that time.

But again, it's possible to argue that Marie Wilkinson ought to have taken better care of the young women modelling for her husband; it's possible to argue that she should have taken better care of her daughter who spent part of her preteens and teen years modelling nude for her father.

As I said at the beginning of this section, though, my own subject position means I'm not well qualified to question and doubt here. I would want to protect the 23-year-old Kishkan from blame and innuendo, but how can I know what she was thinking, really, and am I just a man in my 50s seeking Wilkinson-style to protect a young woman?

All I have to work from is this book. I see in the version of Kishkan that she depicts here elements of her fictional characters (Izzy in Weight of the Heart, for example, who puts herself at risk multiple times by drinking alone with groups of men; Grace Oakden naked and alone at Sandcut Beach), but using memoir and fiction as romans à clef for each other is a terrible idea.

Others Looking at This Book 

In the end, I've kept this review shorter than it was threatening to become, and I've abandoned whole threads. If you're still here but I haven't said something that you thought I was going to get to, I'm sorry, and you're going to have to get it somewhere else unless I can't help returning.

Denise Ryan's review in Quill & Quire is a thoughtful one, and Catherine Owen's response to the book at River Street is intimate and thorough. Kishkan's own page about the book, too, will give you lots of other reviews and context if you want that.

Just read the book, okay? You won't regret it!