Week 9 - Discourse, Sign, Body and Gaze

“WACK!”

‘Most of the interesting American artists of the last thirty years are as interesting as they are because of the feminist movement of the early 1970s. It changed everything’ – Holland Cotter 2007 [1]

Consisting of 119 artists, activists, film makers, writers, teachers and thinkers, “Wack!” was an exhibition held at the Geffen contemporary at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Based upon the notion that feminism has caused a fundamental change in art practice, critiquing its assumptions and structures of methodology; it suggests gender to be a fundamental category for the organization of culture, patterning organizations that usually favour men.

The title recalls the bold idealism of the 60’s and 70’s and stresses that the impact of Feminist art is yet to be theorized and accepted by academic institutions and the violent and sexual connotations reinforcing feminism’s affront to patriarchy.

The exhibitions aims were to make the case that feminism in the 1970’s was the most influential “movement” of the post-war period seldom cohering to other movements such as Abstract Expressionism and minimalism. As an independent entity Feminism constitutes an ideology of shifting criteria, influenced by a myriad of factors; an open-ended system sustaining self-critique and containing wildly divergent political ideologies and practices.

The artists presented in “WACK!” characterize throughout their work that feminism coexisted with political engagement on fronts of race, class and sexual orientation, opposed to a more selfish goal to liberate women.

Strategy – curatorial procedure likened with the excavation of material traces and fragmented histories, recombined into stratigraphies to produce new meanings and insights on reality in order to specifically addressing the encounter between work and viewer.“WACK!” hopes to invoke feminist art’s romantic striving for reorganization of hierarchy and exalt the different ways feminists positioned themselves within feminism through resistance and the disruption of canon formation, supporting narrative functioning within different frames of the organization.

Whilst the show does not include male artists, the structure is told in terms of women who pioneered feminism, this could however be viewed as an equitable situation based upon socio-political gender-based mandates such as the “all-women show”, and whilst the show appears to hold no discrimination towards men it appears that it may be placing the artists exhibited into the gender-stratified groups that white, male institutions have been placing them in for centuries. Whilst it was considered as to exhibit the works of male artists, it was eventually rejected which I personally find to be at the show’s disadvantage; there are plenty of male artists speaking on behalf on gender, class and racial equality and the rejection appears to segregate them from a highly important show.

Whilst the exhibition utilises lesser known artists such as Zoe Leonard it also exhibits works of much more well known practitioners such as the Guerrilla Girls, Eva Hesse and Barbara Kruger. The exhibition exists in regards to the expansion of feminine art and whilst many artists in the show were not actively a part of the feminist movement, it is through their successes as individual women that transcended boundaries of inequality. The more overt examples such as Kruger and the Guerrilla girls specifically adorn a sense of feminism deeply rooted in both rebellion and informative gesture, and their addition to the show is in effort of their great contributions to feminism over the years and of course to their significant value throughout popular culture. This addition creates a commercial based element to the exhibition not only generating greater publicity but also breaking any pre-conceptions that feminist artists are confined to underground movements. Whilst the broad range within the show is necessary I believe that through reaching a wider audience using “big-names”, a larger amount of people may be educated about the inequalities fluent in art institutions today

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Man’s Best Friend), 1987

Silkscreen on canvas, 242 x 278cm

Kruger has been producing graphically striking, visual pieces since the 1980s in order to address the ideological structures of sexism, political authority and consumerism. Kruger juxtaposes concise and multivalent slogans in bold red and white italics over black and white photographs in order to employ visual conventions of advertising to draw the viewer’s plane of vision. The frequent use of interrogative statements such as “I”, “you”, “we” or “man” she disrupts the viewer’s passivity, becoming conscious of their individual identities.

The title reminds us of the cliché of “A dog is man’s best friend” linking domestic dogs to their human masters.

However, Kruger simply places “Man’s Best Friend” over an image of the Supreme Court Building in Washington DC, calling for the viewer to fit the associations together. The image unravels the conventional significance of the phrase and forced the viewer to ask “Is the law man’s best friend? Who and what is the Law?” The inscription on the buildings facade reads “Equal Justice Under Law” but associated with “man” as a signifier of gender opposed to a generic noun, we are forced to question this supposed equality. Suggesting that man is privileged under the law open further gateways of association into the patriarchal structure of the law whether they be judges, lawyers or senators.

Created during the Reagan years of the 1980s, the piece draws to attention how gender equality is propagated even on the surfaces of monumental public architecture. Despite the promise of equal justice, Reagan denied recognition of women’s rights and notoriously opposed the equal rights amendment. Even the composition and framing suggest an exclusive institution as her text stands in the way of the buildings main entrance and the inclusion of the female allegory named the “Contemplation of Justice”; as an abstract concept opposed to an active participant in history, submissive like man’s other best friend, the dog.

Guerrilla Girls

The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988

Offset print on paper, 43 x 56cm

Emerging during the 1980s, “activist” artists the Guerrilla Girls came to represent a useful and much needed awareness of the inequalities within the art world but encouraged a ‘niche of resistance, a militant model of representation that adopted self-awareness as action’ [2]. These veiled mystery artists unmask the discrimination on accounts of race, sex and the use of female stereotypes of virgins, mothers, whores and goddesses circulating throughout institutions such as MOMA. Using the unique concept of parasitic art the group spreads the word using the media through fliers, posters and postcards in a similar fashion to Kruger in order to exploit an exploitative means of spreading discriminative ideologies. The group continues to remind us that in the twenty-first century works by female artists are still worth less than those of their male counterparts.

Here we find the use of sarcastic humour to embody the disadvantages of being a woman artist, yet turning them on their head in order to cite ironic evidence of the advantages that men directly receive from these transactions. The amusing anecdotes whilst bringing a smile to the face highlight the lack of recognition women artists gain throughout their careers, the stereotyping of works being labelled as feminist and the pomp and bravura of upper-middle class opening nights that women need not be pained to attend.

[1] Cornelia H. Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007, pp. 17

[2] Cornelia H. Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007, pp. 319

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang presents a similar show aiming to congratulate 45 years of feminism in the arts. The show has relatively the same manifesto as “WACK!” in its goals to voice feminism as having an enormous impact of the visual arts. The exhibition concerns who represents whom and questions the different systems of representation and continue to construct stereotypes regarding gender, race and sexuality and like its contemporary shows only female artists in order to place emphasis on the political questions posed by feminist art, in order to pay tribute to its pioneers and successors; like “WACK!” the exhibit insists that it does not belittle male artists in the process of this selection.

As I have stated, the exhibition appears to mimic the previously discussed show through its emphasis on reacting against predominant and elitist traditions of art history, fighting for civil rights for women and other minorities and to make women visible within the contemporary arts; yet unlike “WACK!”, I find it unsettling that in the same paragraph that the introduction quotes Linda Nochlin with her question “Why have there been no great women artists?” this very same source is contradicted. Whilst the catalogue addresses the inequalities of the art world it states that ‘In 2007 we are able to verify that there certainly are great women artists, but it is essential we do so at the top of our voices and do not tire of the effort’, yet Nochlin’s text states that through attesting this point we can only reinforce the negative implications that they are absent in art history. The exhibition appears to value the celebration of feminist artists opposed to the exposal of inequalities they have worked so hard to achieve.

Rasheed Araeen

‘How do I, a non-European, relate to the European society I find myself living in but do not belong? How do I react to its assumptions of white supremacy?’ [1]

1964 - Moves to London

1965-1968 - Works for BP

1968 - Devotes his attention to sculpture

1973 - Becomes a member and active contributor to the Black Panther movement in Brixton

1975 - Joins Artists For Democracy and begins writing about art in relation to the position of Afro/Asian artists working in Britain and the Third World, in which he begins his Black Manifesto

1978 - Founds the magazine Black Phoenix, which only published three issues

1979-1980 - Becomes a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Panel of the Greater London Arts Association

1982 - Starts Project MRB, an art education in multicultural Britain program, a research contribution of Afro/Asian artists in Britain

1984 - Expands MRB into Black Umbrella in order to establish an Afro/Asian peoples' visual arts, resource and information centre for the training and teaching of multicultural art

1987 Publishes Third Text, a quarterly publication aiming at developing historically and theoretically informed Black and Third World perspectives on contemporary visual arts

Araeen showed in only five group exhibitions in fifteen years, and it wasn’t until age 44 that he gained his first one-person show. Mostly unrecognized throughout his career (despite winning the prestigious Liverpool John Moore’s Painting Prize), he created great significance in British art in relation to race self-representation. During the 1970s, new approaches regarding cultural identity and a growing dissatisfaction with ideological implications of modernism arose, he felt that living in a society where access to his own institutions and frames of reference were denied – it was here on that Araeen expanded his work unto race politics.

Working within the modernist era of studio based practice, he found his surroundings to be inappropriate and fewer opportunities to show his art. This transcended his practice unto art writing in which he wrote ‘Making Myself Visible’ (1984) stating that to ‘challenge[d] the established mainstream has been the desire for self-representation of those who have been formerly represented by others’ [2]. It is through this engagement that Araeen was able to actively engage in writing and shaping art history, the book is a shameful indictment of the British art establishments assertion of privilege and exclusivity, juxtaposing Araeen’s pursuit of means and strategies to enable personal, political and cultural relevance.

During the 1980’s, the decade of equal opportunity policies and the promotion of black artists, a new rhetoric was formed in white institutions to stress a visible commitment to black artists. It appears that in some shape or form, Araeen’s persistence forced issues of cultural identity and race politics into cultural debate, engendering reassessments and dissent.
However, these supposes improvements remain open to questioning as an apparent acceptance by the art world of manifestations of revolt can merely be a subtler retention of control – claiming self representation is still subject to power structures where black artists have minimal access.
Araeen’s retrospective showed at the Ikon gallery in London in 1988 yet the tour was largely restricted and did not stray widely across Britain, this directly shows the art establishments indifference as tradition shows one-person shows to generally have a greater value to those of group shows. Whilst black artists are usually restricted to group shows with a near exclusive concentration of “ethnic” art we find not the products of black artists but spectacles closer to white stereotypes of black art masquerading as a new and radical commitment.

The majority of Araeen’s work since the 1970’s emphasizes the spectator’s position as culturally specific, implicating different positions of hierarchy. His work focuses on the unstable relationship between representation and the subject in terms of power and struggles for the right to self-represent.

I Love it, It Loves I 1978-83
Twelve colour photographs with text, both in Urdu and English

In this piece the Western viewer experiences extreme disorientation as the twelve colour photos are arranged chronographically from right to left, making little sense to the Western reading preferences moving from left to right. This visual narrative cannot be read due to its Urdu script and forces the viewer to move closer to read the small font English translation underneath, the visual coherence from the systematic arrangement disintegrates into a glimpse of detail and fragments as the viewers vision is concentrated, refusing to fall in place and ordering the reader’s presence in relation to the work.

Here, the Urdu speaker is in a privileged language position whilst the Westerner is denied centre stage, being forced to move back and forth in order to understand the narrative. The piece provides recognition of cultural and hierarchal difference placing the Westerner in a position to understand and sympathise with Asian artists, opposed to aiding as an act of revenge.

Golden Calf 1987
Mixed Media

Golden Calf juxtaposed Warhol’s Marilyn as an icon of a globalized masculine desire contrasted with silkscreen photographs of mourning Iranian women (a stereotype of non-Western female victimization), both appear four times throughout the painting in self-conscious repetition.

In the centre lies a single dead Iranian soldier in a pool of his own blood, this aestheticisation of death is the literal scarification of a son (opposed to I Love it, It Loves I’s goat) and reserves the religious ritual of the blasphemous Jewish idol, the golden calf. Through this idolatry, the mourners become corollary to the individual image as absolute fetish, they are equally anonymous and abstract. Both images represent masculine desire, with the significance that the Iranian soldier must be dead in order to enter Western media and yearning.
Represented at death the soldier marks the site of incommensurability, a return of the repressed played out in hysterical emphasis on the irrationality and uncontrollability of this situation.
Through the numerous repetitions within the piece we find an articulated surplus of the images which self-consciously juxtapose combinations of the visual material used. Araeens places discourses of himself as the other, the ethnic, indicating the limits of such stereotypes.

[1] Rasheed Araeen, 1979

[2] Angela Kingston, Antonia Payne, Rasheed Araeen, From Modernism to Post-Modernism, Rasheed Araeen: a Retrospective: 1959-1987, Birmingham, Ikon Gallery Publishing, 1987

Bibliography

Araeen Rasheed, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain, London, South Bank Centre, 1989

Angela Kingston, Antonia Payne, Rasheed Araeen, From Modernism to Post-Modernism, Rasheed Araeen: a Retrospective: 1959-1987, Birmingham, Ikon Gallery Publishing, 1987

Sonia Boyce

Boyce’s unsettling, unnamed and indefinable objects are made from her own hair, secreting an air of magical contemplation. Throughout her exhibitions they are allowed to be touched, and invite this desire, expressing personal fantasies and imaginings to create the ultimate fetish object.
They express the relationship between the public and private creating a spectacular triangle of the artist, viewer and object. Using the tension of what is familiar on one hand and uneasy and discomforting on the other, these objects of fear and desire balance on the edge of humour and terror becoming either playful wigs or human scalps as fragments of absent bodies, specifically the artist herself.

The hair sculptures play sardonically on the difference between the sexual fetish of Freudian theory and the fetish of colonial discourses in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks [1]. Skin becomes the very signifier of cultural and racial difference in stereotype; it is the most visible of all fetishes and recognized by common knowledge in a range of cultural, political and historical discourses, playing a part in racial drama enacted in colonial societies. Pieces and fragments occupy the “zone of indiscernability”, they are seen and unseen, causing the sexual and racial combine in the post-colonial metropolis.

These ‘metonymic signifiers of race [are] partial indicators of “blackness”’ [2] mark a simultaneous presence and absence of black people in our society, defying reduction of racial difference into a singular, undifferentiating sign and becoming a myriad of signs remaining inconclusive without the viewer to complete the narrative. Boyce’s hair sculptures collapse the distinction between object and viewer and whilst as the artist is absent, she is party present through the remains in which she left behind. The object on the other hand can become part of the artist, the viewer (as a wig) or simply independent by itself. Her work insists on the primacy of the body and, an implicitly present trace of anonymity.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, New York, Grove Press, 1967

[2] Gilane Tawadros, Sonia Boyce – Speaking in Tongues, London, KALA Press, 1997

Bibliography

Simone Alexander, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Allan de Souza, Keith Piper, Employing the image [videorecording] making spaces for ourselves, London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1989

Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, New York, Grove Press, 1967

Gilane Tawadros, Sonia Boyce – Speaking in Tongues, London, KALA Press, 1997

Week 8 - Public/Private- space, modernity, the city

During the period of Parisan modernism of 1860-1890  there existed a patriarchy within the spaces represented by the artists in terms of their gender creating a weighty restriction to female artists whilst creating the utmost amount of freedom for the male artist. The paintings of practitioners such as Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Degas possess great variety in their representation of modernity ranging from the Ladies and prosperous families of the theatre, park, bedroom, drawing room and house grounds, to the Fallen Women of the brothel, café, folies and backstage at the theatre. What is interesting is that female painters such as Cassatt and Morisot are restricted to only the Ladies and families that the previous painters have access to, not once creating works in which the courtesan or the prostitute become the subject matter.

Renoir, The Loge (1874)

We can the difference in the spatial relations of representation that male and female artists envisage within identical social spaces, here we see a greater gender gap appear within the realms of social structure. The Loge (1874) by Renoir and The Loge (1882) by Mary Cassatt resemble the almost identical scene of a box at the opera, however both hold considerable differences in their composition and representation of the scene. For instance, in Renoir’s piece we can observe a well-dressed lady sitting in the loge at the opera; however her attention is not focused on the show at hand, rather towards the male spectator who exists as both Renoir in pre-composition and ourselves as the viewer. Her facial expression suggests she is delighted by her male observer sharing in his excitement, yet does so in a submissive manner as she does not appear to be aware that she is offering herself as a spectacle for both ourselves and for the male figure behind her; this character himself does not actually acknowledge her presence as his eyes wander upwards, possibly towards another woman.  The lack of self-awareness, as the ‘young woman lets herself be admired’ [1], allows for the viewer to enjoy her all the more due to her submissive nature and beautiful garments which attract the male bourgeoisie around her; ‘the women in his paintings are never given an active role; their beauties are displayed to the eye, put at the disposal of a male viewer’ [2].

Cassatt, The Loge (1882)

            Cassatt’s image on the other hand is composed on a polar-opposite, unlike Renoir’s comfortably seated courtesan the two ladies in the scene sit stiffly erect in their postures, ‘ramrod straight, awkwardly clutching a fan before a face or a bouquet of flowers held a little too tightly on the lap’[3]. Their faces, with unenthused expressions hinting at vast feelings of tedium veer towards the show rather than the viewer/spectator in a desperate attempt to immerse themselves in the world away from that which they are situated in. Signified here is a feeling of unease, constraint and suppressed excitement due to the introduction of a public space that is scary and daunting, as they are paraded ‘exposed and dressed up, on display’ [4]. The girls possess a self-awareness of being placed on display for others in their appealing clothes which we can see from their rigid appearance; the image refuses to comply with the norms of the day and counters the view of femininity expressed within Renoir’s piece. Interestingly, the figures also appear to attribute their own sense of a gaze in which their interests focus towards an independent perspective, geared away from surveying their own actions in order to impress those who stare.

            In relation to pictorial space, Cassatt paints her scene within the reach of her own arms length suggesting that she too is nestled close to the figures, possibly knowing them on a personal basis. The piece is also composed at an oblique angle which places the two figures off-centre in the piece, thus disallowing the girls to be framed and ‘made a pretty picture for us as in [Renoir’s] The Loge’[5]. This element is persistent in many female impressionist works, including Cassatt’s Lydia at Tapestry Frame (1881) and Morisot’s The Cradle (1872). Whilst Cassatt paints at a canted angle at incredibly close proximity to the female figures Renoir composes from afar; his painting is clearly of a stranger unknown to him from across the theatre who was seated in a loge away from his immediate vicinity.

Morisot, The Cradle (1872)

Cassatt, Lydia at Tapestry Frame (1881)

            The elements thus brought forth are direct results of the new developments in culture that have been presented; in the 1880s Modernity had offered  new class divisions within the bourgeoisie –  cafés, the brothel and the opera fashioned new pastimes for the current members of society, but with these new developments had strict rules regarding gender. During this accelerated times the bourgeois woman’s place existed within the home and its grounds, in the defiance of these unwritten rules one could risk ‘losing one’s virtue, dirtying oneself’ [6], severely damaging the name and standing of both herself and her husband, but also the femininity in which she represented. She would only leave the house by escort of her husband, but was still restricted to where she could be taken; certain areas of this new society such as the brothels were considered unladylike which is why the works of Cassatt and Morisot are restricted to such scenes as the park and the theatre. Bourgeois males on the other hand existed as Flâneurs soaking in the social atmosphere being free to roam on their own to all areas within this new world whether they represented class and glamour or smut and sordidness, he was the true free citizen.

            Cassatt’s close proximity figures examine this regarding her own situation; the close proximity to her subjects act as a metaphor towards her lack of outward mobility and confinement to being escorted around destinations. The two girls are possibly her immediate family which she required in order to visit the scene, as escorts and subject depicting the era’s gender gap, the closeness of the figures and the off centre canted angle are not elements of choice but of the limitation in which she suffers whilst attaining the shot she.

Degas Brothel monoprints, which he created between the years of 1875 and 1885 are anecdotal and caricatural, closer to journalistic images and photos in scale, medium and language. Perfectly situated within their journalistic nature is their political meaning that permeates throughout the collection; Duchâtelet’s study of Nineteenth Century Parisian society explored the idea that prostitution was endemic due to natural male demand and a regular supply of filles from a morally defective class of women. As an open prejudice to the Proletariat, these “sperm sewers” were suggested to be mentally ill, the weaker sex, subject to outbursts and emotional displays, opposed to pure and virgin middle class women. These working class women were the corner stone of urban sexuality’s structure through their economic, legal and moral inferiority which was used to preserve the respectability of the middle class women.

His prints in general arevulgar because they are not situated in the manner traditional to the reclining traditional nude, yet despite this deviation, the images are reminiscent of old master iconography through composition of setting. Rather paradoxically, these attributes are also mixed with those of Nineteenth Century pornographic prints; only pornography identifies the viewer as the lover through a gaze which is met, whilst in Degas’ prints the gaze is absent and oblique creating a double artificiality in which the female is made unavailable, in turn a rift is created in which desire is no longer present and reverts instead to disgust.

Degas’ Relaxation [Black ink on China paper, 159 × 121, 1879-80] is an image of high artificiality. Here we find a lack of evidence of spatial, anecdotal or compositional relationships and appears to represent that of a political cartoon, it almost as if Degas is the voyeur peeping through the keyhole at them. To the left a prostitute lies with her leg in the air, a blasphemy to the ideal nude, and a pose associated with hysteria as shown in the studies of Dr. Paul Richer, suggesting the uncontrollable and inferior woman, prone to excessive masturbation unable to manage her sexual desires.

Le Client Sérieux [Black ink on white paper, 210 × 159, 1879-80] shows similar traits and presents to us glorified lumpish women, bovine with worn provocation, cavorting and sprawled lewdly in hysterics. These attributes are emphasized by several more vulgar metaphors such as the customer’s phallic umbrella. It stands limp as hesitant and its wielder’s presence becomes peripheral, and the scene becomes a shabby representation, opposed to one of pleasure. Again it is almost as if we are placed outside the scene becoming a neutral onlooker, in opposition to Cassatt and Morisot who place us within the claustrophobic confines of their space. The ‘through the key hole’ effect is again emphasizing the disgust Degas feels towards these women despite the engagement he most likely had with them. They are grotesque to him due to class difference and inferiority opposed to that of their bodies, and thus makes himself and ourselves unavailable to them through the subtraction of spatial elements

[1] Anne Distel, ‘Catalogue for the Exhibition 1871 – 1880’, Renoir Exhibition Catalogue, Haywood Gallery, London, 30 January – 21 April 1985, Galeries Nationales Du Grand Palais, Paris, 14 May – 2 September 1985, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 9 October 1985 – 5 January 1986, (Great Britain, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), pp. 203

 [2] John House, ‘Renoir’s Worlds’, Renoir Exhibition Catalogue, Haywood Gallery, London, 30 January – 21 April 1985, Galeries Nationales Du Grand Palais, Paris, 14 May – 2 September 1985, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 9 October 1985 – 5 January 1986, (Great Britain, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), pp. 16

[3] Griselda Pollock, ‘Modern Women – Modern Spaces 1877-91’, Mary Cassatt, Painter of Modern Women, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp.144

[4] Griselda Pollock, ‘Modern Women – Modern Spaces 1877-91’, Mary Cassatt, Painter of Modern Women, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp.144

[5] Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, Vision and Difference, (London, Routledge classics, 1988), pp. 75

Week 7 - Bodies of Difference: Embodiment and Representation

Carol Duncan, "MOMAs's Hot Mamas', Art Journal 1989, 171-178
Duncan introduces to her argument the “artifacts of rule”, these are objects which inadvertently confirm the male’s social superiority over female identity, a vast collection of which are found in the Museum of Modern Art New York. Here she suggests that MOMA’s “new” collection is mostly unchanged, still beginning with Cézanne and ending with Abstract expressionism.
Duncan deduces that the museum is crowded with selective images of whores, prostitutes and all women at the lowest of the social scale, and asks “what do sexually available bodies on a monumental scale have to do with art?” Why is it prestigious and why are these “heroes” celebrated?

The museum acts as a spiritually masculinized quest, suggesting that art is primarily a male endeavor, yet the transcendence is more likely to be based on fears and desires of the female form.
Males create for themselves a distorted form of a dangerous woman-creature who is overpowering, castrating and devouring. At this plane of culture, modern art museums appear intelligible despite its misogynistic traits. Whilst abstract expressionism may appear to lack this discrimination, it is its goal to escape the physical and biological, rebelling against the mother and the biological female form.

MOMA’s few women artists are considered anomalies since they de-gender the ritual ordeal, they are kept at a minority since the female presence is only necessary in its imagery, not its artists. Male imagery is both mentally and physically active, and not sexually available. These representations emit the impression of highly self conscious, psychologically complex beings whose sexual feelings are leavened with poetic pain, frustration, heroic fear, protective irony and artistic motivation.

As Duncan states, the interiors are mostly the same and the collection is hardly revised; always seated at the doorway at these monuments of ultimate freedom are De Kooning’s Women I. It commands so much importance that when it was loaned to another museum on load it was replaced by Woman II, this is because of their exceptionally successful deployment as ritual artifacts that masculinize the museum’s space. Woman I emerged in 1951 – 52 as a large, vulgar, sexual, and dangerous beast, sporting iconic frontality, a toothy mouth and large bulging eyes. It is reminiscent of mainstream pornography, opening its thighs to present a self exposing vagina.

These attributes are present in tribal art and that of the Gorgon, and like the Gorgon she simultaneously suggests and avoids the explicit act sexual display. As the mother goddess her lust for blood is emphasized and conjures powerlessness in men who stand before her, representing castration, the vagina dentate and the feeling of inadequacy before women in male psychic development. These fears shared in communal myth and imagery appear to create universal higher truths, and like the Gorgons in her Ancient Greek shrine it becomes worshipped in the high cultural house of the modern world.
The ubiquitous Woman I strikes a paradoxically, ambiguous yet dangerous truth – like the medusa the hero must look at her flat image through the shield, placing it at the centre of his work he secures the aura of myth and mystical authority. She is monumental, iconic and teasing, frighteningly ambiguous, associating with both high art and smutty magazine centerfolds. Yet she is rendered harmless due what De Kooning calls her “silliness”, these ambiguities allow for a chance to overcome this monster cultural and psychological place to enact the myth of the artist-hero, asserting patriarchal privilege of objectifying sexual fantasy as high culture.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on November 15^th 1887 gaining private painting instruction at an early age. At eighteen years old she studied at the school of the Art Institute Chicago and became a member of the Art Student League in New York City. Following a conventional European curriculum she trained in the art of still life, life and cast drawing, developed wholly in America, unlike many of her contemporaries.

Teaching at schools in Virginia, Texas and South Carolina, she shifted course in 1915 to follow her own artistic instincts, experimenting with an individual style. She gained support from artist and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz and exhibited in his gallery known as 291 for the first time in 1916, as her supporter and promoter of her work, he also became her lover and they married in 1924 .
O’Keeffe moved to Mexico City due to the feelings of oppression she felt the city presented, and for the next twenty years she would travel West during the Summer months to paint in solitude and return every Winter to exhibit at Steiglitz’s galleries. After Steiglitz’s death, O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1949 in order to explore the myriads nuances found in a relatively limited number of subjects surrounding landscapes, flowers and bones. It is the form of O’Keeff’s work that is essential, her simplification of detail through her lack of specificity throughout these three subjects despite her primary observation and familiarity create synthesized abstract symbols of nature and generalized representations transcending more specific categories and becoming universal motifs to be used in other contexts.

Cow’s Skull: Red, White and Blue, 1931

Oil on Canvas

The Bones of O’Keeffe’s cow’s skull cut sharply into the centre of something that is keenly alive in the landscape of the desert, despite its vast, empty and untouchable terrain, it represents beauty, purity and danger. In the eloquent construction of line and form a symbolic image raising issues of nationalism and religion arises. The piece retains a simple composition; the frontal skull becomes an image of power almost like that of a sacred relic, although it’s upright positioning and ‘cowboy’ associations appear to suggest a phallic form, an idolized symbol of masculinity. Further more the religious connotation is exemplified through the compositional formation of a cross configuration using the skull’s extended horns and vertical support, the ultimate symbol of masculinity, a fetishized male god. As the title re-iterates, we also see the American flag colours reinforcing the sacredness of the landscape in regards to nationalism.

Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, 1931

Oil on Canvas

Despite the near identical composition to Red, White and Blue we find many of the same forms yet the piece manages to achieve the opposite effect, delivering light-heartedness through subtle humour. Here the masculine imagery of the skull is feminised with a beautiful flower in its hair, and further abstracted and softened with subtle undertones. Due to the generalized form the flowers appear to represent the vulvas we find in Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, in which an alternative reading may suggest the masculiniztion of the feminine through the imagery of the skull.

From the Faraway Nearby, 1937

Oil on Canvas

From the Faraway Nearby reintroduces the imagery of the skull yet combines it with that of the Western landscape, its expansive emptiness and the exhilaration induced by its spatial experience. The impossible and mythical beast portrayed is a statement not on death or the temporality of life but a statement of what endures and is eternal. Resting upon the landscape it expresses similarities to the earth’s peaks in colour and contrast becoming an extension of the landscape itself.

The skull gains an ambiguous spatial depth as it looms towards the picture plane causing the landscape to recede quickly, developing an enormous depth variance which flattens the landscape.

Bibliography

Buhler Lynes Barbara, Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999

Hutton Turner Elizabeth, Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, London, Washington DC and Yale University Press, 1999

Messinger Lisa Mintz, Gorgia O’Keeffe, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1989

Robinson Roxanna, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1989

Judy Chicago
Dinner Party-Place Setting, Ceramic Plate of Georgia O'Keefe, 1974-1979

Georgia O'Keeffe's is the last place setting at The Dinner Party. Of the works in the installation it posses the most height, signifying O’Keeffe’s liberation and success as a female artist. The imagery on O'Keeffe's plate incorporates the forms she used in her own flower paintings, such as Black Iris (1926), with the vulvic central core used throughout The Dinner Party. Whilst Chicago pays tribute to O'Keeffe's originality and the imagery, she also acknowledges the influence O'Keefe had on later feminist artists, claiming her work as "pivotal in the development of an authentically female iconography" (Chicago,The Dinner Party, 155).On the runner are airbrushed colours corresponding to the plate's colour palette; Chicago chose these colours to represent fine art painting, and O'Keeffe's participation in that tradition. A piece of raw Belgian linen, which is used for art canvases, is attached to cherry wood stretcher bars. At the front of the runner, the first initial of O'Keeffe's name is stitched using the style of her famous skull paintings, which were influenced by the American West. The embroidered letter "G" suggests the antler formations of such works as The Faraway Nearby (1937), suggesting a kindred bond between two.

Black Iris (1926)
Straying away from O’Keeffe, Chicago reminds of us what the female body provides; the flowering arrangement of the vagina yet the commitment and determination of O’Keeffe. The fetish of the vulva seeks to displace the obscene and uses the humour of Shelly Lowell and Sam Haskins I order to subvert the inherent disgust of female genitalia by indulging in clichés and innuendos. Chicago reverses the situation of women by re-presenting a joke regarding the notion of a universally understood subject opposed to being dictated to by the authority of art institutions.
Nonetheless, the 1970s presented women with a new sense of authority over their bodies; the dark greenish colouring and the convulsions of flesh confuse the boundaries of inside and out thus removing women from the erotic gaze.

Bibliography

Madeline Caviness, ‘The De-eroticised Body: Aesthetic Codes, Fragmentation, and the problem of agency, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001

Amelia Jones, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner part in Feminist Art History, Los Angeles, 1996

Lucie Smith, Judy Chicago: an American Vision, New York, Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000

Sylvia Sleigh
Philip Golub Reclining, 1971

Using the role reversal, Sleigh explored the question of values attached to the traditional representations of women and men, and the absence in Western art of erotic portraits of men juxtaposed the idealized stances traditionally given to gods or figure-heads with commonplace contemporary settings. These portraits are also characterized by an almost obsessive attention to detail such as body hair being elaborated in all its various peculiarities. Sleigh’s Goddesses are modelled by friends, portrayed in real-life situations rather than anonymous women. Here Philip is passively positioned in a traditional reclining pose, juxtaposed with his long bouffant hair style it suggests a certain androgyny challenging the notion of the traditional nude. We can see Sleigh who reminds us that the painting was created through the process of making art, thus losing any erotic qualities it may have had. The painting’s role reversal has received great criticism due to the reactionary tactic of objectifying the male yet it appears to state more clearly the objectification of women, simply using the tactic of reversal so that we may actually ‘see’ a situation that our eyes are so de-sensitized by.

Bibliography

C. Streifer Rubinstein: American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present, Boston, 1982, pp. 401–3

P. Dunford: A Biographical Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and America since 1850, Hemel Hempstead, 1990

Sylvia Sleigh: Invitation to a Voyage and Other Works, Milwaukee, WI, A. Mus.; Muncie, IN, Ball State U., A.G.; Youngstown, OH, Butler Inst. Amer. A.; 1990





Suzanne Valadon
The Blue Room, 1923

Born September 23 1865
The first female painter permitted to join the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
Dies April 7 1938
Valadon was encouraged as an artist by Edgar Degas and highly regarded by Picasso, George Braque and Andre Derain. As a beautiful woman she modelled for Renoir, de Chavannes and Lautrec, radically shaping her ideals of the model as an object. Her work is ‘characterized a certain tension between expectations set up by genre and the way she actually represents the female body’ [1] due to her experience of being the subject matter. As we can see through the models traditional reclining pose, and luscious Manet-esque surroundings juxtaposed with her slightly masculine figure and refusal to even expose partial nudity her work endeavoured to depict women untainted by the voyeur, suggesting resistance to the dominant representations of women in the early twentieth-century, and would also account for the ‘confusion of critics, who have described her work as both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ [2].
[1] Rosemary Betterton, ‘How do Women Look?: Suzanne Valadon and the Nude, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, London, Pandora Publishing, 1987, pp. 222
[2] Ibid, pp. 222

Bibliography
Rosemary Betterton, ‘How do Women Look?: Suzanne Valadon and the Nude, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, London, Pandora Publishing, 1987

Patricia Matthews, ‘Returning the Gaze: Diverse Representations of the Nude in the Art of Suzanne Valadon’, Art Bulletin, 1991, 73