How women can be represented through a variety of visual media?
- to what extent
- by what means
“abstract”, “non-representational” painting
Can women represent themselves as embodied subjects?
Shirley Kaneda
AN INTIMATE DISTANCE – Women, artist and the body
Suzanne Valadon, self portrait, 1931
“The act of painting herself naked is both intimate, connected to her sense of self, and at the sane time, places her body at a distance as the object of representation.”
How the female body should be represented?
What it mean to inhabit that body?
logocentric vision
Logocentrism 逻各斯中心论 – It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. 对于西方形而上学传统特征的一种后现代表述；这种特征就是将逻各斯（理性）当做真理和意义的中心，并相信真理能为主体经过理性的内在之光而知晓。
“The Body Polite” the first anthology from the British women’s movement, edited by Michelene Wandor, 1972.
“How to theorize the body as the borderline between the biological and the social, the natural and the cultural.”
“Women’s art has also begun to reconstruct our conception of what female bodies might mean in our culture.”
“Destruction of the viewer’s pleasure was to be a radical weapon and new kinds of engagement were offered which avoided any direct figuration of the female body.”
Mary Kelly, Post Partum Document, 1973-9
Post-Partum Document is a six-year exploration of the mother-child relationship. When it was first shown at the ICA in London in 1976, the work provoked tabloid outrage because Documentation I incorporated stained nappy liners. Each of the six-part series concentrates on a formative moment in her son’s mastery of language and her own sense of loss, moving between the voices of the mother, child and analytic observer. Informed by feminism and psychoanalysis, the work has had a profound influence on the development and critique of conceptual art.
How to represent the sexual body in ways which could not be framed within a “male gaze”.
“You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image.” (Roland Barthes, 1977)
“The Grain of the Voice” Roland Barthes
“In Speculum of the Other Woman” Luce Irigaray, 1985
Julia Kristeva
Helene Cixous
Catherine Clement
“men looked” & “women appeared” – women as passive objects of the look
– men as active subjects of their own desires
“A woman needs to recreate herself in forms which will more properly represent her material body:’ Otherwise she is in danger of using or reusing that to which man has already given form(s) particularly of her self/selves, working what has already been worked and losing herself in the labyrinth’ “ (Luce Irigaray)
“…female bodies are themselves constituted by culture as well as within nature… ”
“… how we inhabit our bodies psychically is also culturally and socially constructed. The body itself becomes the site of social and political inscription rather than a given biological truth.”
“Concepts of the body, its pleasure, pain and desire remain central to feminist culture practice.”
Reference:
Betterton, R. (2005). An intimate distance. London: Routledge.
Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s works includes drawings, videos and public performances. I saw her video works “My father and I dance in outer space” on channel video, this work is so profound for me as it investigates physical, historical and psychic connections between the artist and her deceased father.
The artist used stop motion animation techniques to create the sense of flight, dance and intergalactic connection. She also explores the deep knowledge of the body, used body to understand and experience acts of return.
I work a lot with body in my works and I also tried stop motion animation in one of my works last semester, this work inspires me a lot conceptually and technically.
Her other video works like “Belongings” also works using body as a language to work with the concept of the significance, centrality and struggle of the body at a moment when physical belongings are virtually meaningless.
I see this work with a lot of similarities with my lying down project and by looking at this I see how I can push my work further to speak on different levels rather than just the personals.
Reference:
Contemporaryand.com. (2017). WURA-NATASHA OGUNJI | Contemporary And. [online] Available at: http://www.contemporaryand.com/person/wura-natasha-ogunji/ [Accessed 1 Oct. 2017].
(2007), b. and Ogunji, W. (2017). belongings (2007). [online] Wuravideos.blogspot.com.au. Available at: http://wuravideos.blogspot.com.au/2008/05/belongings-2007.html [Accessed 1 Oct. 2017].
Wuraogunji.com. (2017). Wura-Natasha Ogunji – videos. [online] Available at: http://wuraogunji.com/section/231339_videos.html [Accessed 1 Oct. 2017].
Body Horror
Death Becomes Her 1992
“The paradox which the film exposes is that while femininity is revealed as artifice, to be a woman in her “natural”state is to invite disgust. Women take the blame for not being what they seem.”
“…what we are horrified by is the threat of bodily disintegration in death, which is itself feminised – Death Becomes Her.”
- Abject
Abject art was brought up on my second crit for the series of still life I did. Abject art is used to describe artworks which explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety particularly referencing the body and bodily functions.
“The abject has a strong feminist context, in that female bodily functions in particular are ‘abjected’ by a patriarchal social order.”
https://thefineartofabjection.wordpress.com/
The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy
Movement as Metaphor
- “The whole universe, oh monks, lies in this fathom-long body and mind.”
Ayya Khema
- every part of our body can be understood as metaphors for the expression of our being.
- The entire repertoire of our life experiences can be accessed and activated through the body in movement.
- movement = primary language of the body
- feelings and experiences are transformed
What is happening in my body?
What is calling for change?
How is my movement revealing things about life?
SEEING OURSELVES
Self-portraits are not innocent reflections of what artists see when they look in the mirror. They are part of the language painters use to make a point, from the simple “this is what I look like” to the more complicated “this is what I believe in”.
was female nudity any less eroticized or objectified because a woman was choosing to display herself instead of being painted by a man?
personal is political?
Sriwhana Spong
Image: Sriwhana Spong, ‘The Fourth Notebook’ 2015, HD video, Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland.
In this video, a written text by Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky forms the basis of a choreographic score which explores the breakdown of language through movement. The text is drawn from Nijinsky’s 1919 diary, in which he charted his descent into what biographer’s assume was schizophrenia. Written in the early stages of his illness, the diary reveals a disintegration of language that is characteristic of the disorder. In this video, the staccato cadences of Nijinsky’s nonsensical phrases provide choreographic prompts for the dancer Benjamin Ord, each text fragment matched with a movement as units of word and gesture.
- language through movement
- explore the multiple and possible identities
- the body and its dissimilarities are smuggled into institutionalised language to create a strange and idiosyncratic speech
Reference:
Gasworks.org.uk. (2017). Residencies | Gasworks. [online] Available at: https://www.gasworks.org.uk/residencies/sriwhana-spong-2016-10-03/ [Accessed 4 Sep. 2017].
The Big Idea. (2017). Stop Making Sense. [online] Available at: https://www.thebigidea.nz/stories/stop-making-sense [Accessed 4 Sep. 2017].
Score, T. (2017). The Score · Events at The University of Melbourne. [online] Events.unimelb.edu.au. Available at: https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/9312-the-score [Accessed 4 Sep. 2017].
Charles Ray and Janine Antoni are important artists who transform ordinary daily activities and nonart materials into startlingly original aesthetic objects, ranging from sculpture and photographs to mixed- media installations.
The human body and sensory experience are underlying elements of both the performatory and metaphorical content of the work.
Eva Hesse. Art that wasn’t art was her aim. “I wanted to get a nonart, nonconnotive, nonanthropomorphic, nongeometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, wort, from a total other reference point,” she wrote in an exhibition statement in 1968.
Kawita Vatanajyankur ‘Carrier’
In this video work, Kawita Vatanajyankur reflects on her experience of migrating to Australia, exploring the resulting shift of identity.
- Old Belongings
old belongings that already demonstrated the damage of time and was exposed to have imperfections as they could be a metaphor of trauma. Trauma induced by external and environmental forces have, overtime, induced a raw fragility.
- Clothings
personal clothings are daily object that has a strong intimacy to the human body. Things like personal clothings, sheets and fabrics are representations of self identity, also it creates a sense of belonging.
notes – The Art of Reflection
4. The Body Politic – Medicine and Health(168)
Body Image(171)
- The distance between the fine art standards of aesthetically pleasing female bodies and own experience of being a woman.
- the body in landscape
- the body in various positions
- self-consciously produced “positions” or “situations” which define women and have little to do with the personal biography of the artist and my psychological responses to events in life.
- physical suffering
- reflection with the body in its absence and presence
A Work In Progress 