The Reclining Nude

Abstract

Opening with a reflection on the woman rolling in the waves in Maya Deren’s At Land, this chapter draws out a series of thoughts on reclining. From the tradition of the reclining nude and the female figure in sensual repose, images of loved and exposed women, it moves to figures of anatomical investigation, proneness, horizontality, and animality. Figures of sleep, dream, and near death gesture to the issues of unknowability and vicariousness the figure conjures. Female voices, Louise Bourgeois, Marguerite Duras, Tilda Swinton, Adriana Cavarero, return in the chapter to allow a stretching of the range of meanings in the figure of the reclining nude, and a new imagining of her evocative presence, and the strange valuing of passivity, indolent resistance, in the work of female-identified artists.