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The body and gender issues

The following notes provide a basis for an in-depth research study related to various issues such as feminism and women’s issues, study on the body, contemporary art practice and social issues of the late 20th century.

The notes look at the ways the body has become a vehicle for the political and social agenda of women artists, particularly over the past 30 years.

Focus Questions and Research

“You need only to look at recent magazine publications or billboards to realise that the majority of images are directed to a male audience.”

Do you feel that the feminist artists have had any influence on societal attitudes? (Cultural frame)
Why has the body been such a focus for women’s and feminist art? (Structural frame)
What is the purpose of presenting a temporary artwork such as performance (that is viewed by so few people) if the intention of the work is to expose the inequalities of our society?(Postmodern frame)
Do you feel that attitudes to the body have changed since early feminist artists, such as Judy Chicago, who presented The Dinner Party (1974), and Vanessa Beecroft VB 40 (1999) (cultural and postmodern frames)

Critics and writers of feminist art from the 1970s to the 1990s have also had profound influences on university courses and the educated thinking of young people. Do critics and writers of the 21st century view the works of feminist artists in the same way?

Look at :

Linda Nochlin’s early writing: “Why have there been no great women artists?” Art and sexual politics Baker and Hess NY 1973
Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses Pandora London 1989.

Issues covered in this document:

Video: Reclaiming the body
Feminist art and Rrap, Kozic and Dement
Performance and femenist issues
Further reading

Video: Reclaiming the body

View the following video:

Reclaiming The Body: 30 years of Feminist Art -Bad Girls Exhibition New York 1997

This is a relevant video for this study. However, please note that the video contains some explicit language. The video examines some of the works of feminist artists. For many, the body has been the main object of their art. Some of the works referred to involve performance, video documentation and photography, installation and more traditional categories of art such as painting and sculpture.

A number of artists are interviewed and they discuss the way feminist art has changed in the past 30 years. Critic and writer Linda Nochlin, (writer of the influential essay Why have there been no great women artists? 1973) also speaks of the way feminism has become an important area of study as well as having profound effects on the way society views women.

Some of the artists include:

Maureen Conner	Dysfunctional object - a tiny dolls’ house wardrobe from which comes the sound of plates breaking. This is a symbol of domestic violence and hiding behind closed doors and the problem of not being acknowledged.
Judy Chicago	looks at the essence of the body and what makes women what they are.
Faith Ringold	makes quilts using traditional methods of craft to indicate the subversive, to destabilise the patriarchal system
Renee Cox	looks at the body, and the idea of the aggressive, powerful sexual woman and what it means to be pregnant.
Janine Antoni	uses the body in performance with symbols of lipstick, hair colour, soap, and chocolate.
Carolee Schneeman	does performances using the body as a symbol of self-mutilation, pushing the body to extremes
Penny Arcade	also uses performance and interaction with the audience to emphasise the inequalities of the patriarchal system

Feminist art and Rrap, Kozic and Dement

Discuss feminist art and discuss artists Rrap, Kozic and Dement

Feminist art

Feminist art provides the space for the recognition of women’s achievements and the characteristics of their art practice. Feminist art practice responds to a bias of art history that privileges the artmaking practice of men.

Feminist art challenges the ideas central to a patriarchal society by recognising that throughout history, the depiction of women has been constructed for a male audience.

An essential aim is to gain autonomy without the acceptance or inclusion within the “accepted male attitude”. To gain this autonomy, many women artists have had to, and continue to, challenge the negative ideas and attitudes that suggest that women are inferior.

A number of Australian artists have used the body to explore the meaning of being female and the role of women in our society.

Julie Rrap (Australian)is an artist who has been actively involved in the critique of what dictates the approach to female sensibility. She has explored whether it is socially or biologically determined and how traditional art practice has influenced ideas. Primarily a photographer, Rrap’s early work of mixed media, has moved to installations and large series of self-portrait images in religious or historically significant poses.

Madonna (1984) and Transpositions (1989) challenge the mostly male history that has largely ignored women artists and the roles played by women in society.

Persona and Shadow is an artwork that is based on the female imagery of Edvard Munch and Rrap critiques the operation of historical determinism by placing her own body where the (unidentified) women is placed.

Hairline Crack consists of a black/brown line at eye level around a narrow room. When viewers enter this space, they see the line close up, revealed as a perspex frame filled with human hair. The static of the perspex encourages the hairs to stand out along the edge of the line like the hairline on a bikini. Quite a powerful statement, at once both alive and suggestive, enforcing a slight repulsive reaction.

In her series Persona and Shadow (1984), Rrap explores the relationship between herself and the historical figures representing women and their role in society. One panel of the series, Virago, consists of a collage of photos manipulated by thick brushstrokes, revealing Rrap naked, tie around her neck and camera in hand. Thus she presents herself in ambiguities, both revealed and revealing, male and female, empty and filled. In Philosophies of the Boudoir - Justine and Juliette, Rrap explores the aspect of pain as experienced by male and female as well as the concept of active female desire that society historically has suppressed.

Maria Kozic (Australian) In attempting to portray a satirical role of the female as aggressive, Kozic underscores the changing role women are creating in society. Bitch (1989) consists of two life sized, plywood cutouts depicting women in scant clothing and wielding large power tools. The image both savagely mocks and fleetingly inhabits a social persona, and is therefore quite separate and yet part of Kozic’s own personality.

In 1991, Kozic heightened this ambiguity in a subsequent video, Bitch. In this video, the artist constantly challenges the traditional concept of beauty, where the portrayal of females in art is constructed around voyeuristic interpretations viewed by a male. Kozic presents a large image of herself in a reclining pose similar to that of a 19th century painting, although here, identity is defined by an aggressive use of power tools and toy men strapped around her waist like trophies.

Most of Kozic’s work explores imagery and themes relating to sex and violence. She is a “post pop” artist who reworks the pop art tradition. (Of course, pop art had never been straightforwardly critical or political and yet it is this ambiguous edge that Kozic attempts to hone.)

As pop artist, Kozic has utilised the system of repetitions, variations, comparisons, juxtapositions and accumulations within a “family” of like images e.g. The Brady Bunch (1985) and Head (1988).

Kozic’s work encompasses many media including video, posters and prints installations film and publishing e.g. comic magazine Dynomite (1991)

Usually, violence is not treated as a social issue; and sex is not related to the sphere of personal experience. Both are quite abstract, metaphors for artistic creation and the processes of mass culture.

Kozic’s work gives individuals an area to explore a variety of definitions concerned with sexuality. Intrinsic in this is the removal of layers of meaning that have developed through a history of cultural and social acceptance. In contemporary society, sexuality has a more social, political and personal role, and the construction of images that concern the body are broader in general parameters. In this manner, artists are re-presenting the body in its historical context, and sexuality is being used to confront the issue of identity of both the self and the society.

Linda Dement (Australian) -Typhoid Mary This work includes manipulated photographic images, poems, academic references, animations, sounds, stories that print out and information from statistical reports and some medical textbooks. There is no beginning or end and the links between the various bodies of information follow an internal illogical logic.

Striking intensity of colours, lush forms, erotic and abject elements of the female body that both entice and repel. This is a fluid, ever changing artwork and seems to reflect on indifference to masculine principles of order, being both feminine and digital.

The opening screen of Typhoid Mary presents a floral arrangement of pixelated petals and by clicking on each, a daisy chain of images of women’s bodies connects to the machine.

A documentation of the artist’s memories and feelings and she is the source of her own material, feeding the computer with images of her flesh and bodily fluids. Memories can be induced by a smell or a taste and can be felt in the stomach or breast.

“Ultimately the body will reflect physical and mental exertion placed upon it... allowing the body to speak... The computer is the prized toy of our essentially male culture. To use technologies which are really intended for a slick, commercial boy’s world, to make personal, bodily feminine work and to reinsert this work into mainstream culture into art discourse and into society, is a political act.” (Ashburn 84;96)

Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995) Makes a positive connection between the otherness of the point of view of woman and the space of multimedia. Here the artist has become the monster, the cyborg, and in the art work body parts form weird and mutant couplings with each other, as though separated from their host bodies. Yet they never free themselves entirely; Dement seems to desire another order, a new set of relations, not realised but ambiguous.

Performance and feminist issues

Performance

Artists include Antoni and Beecroft.

Janine Antoni (USA) One of the feminist artists to explore the issues of sexuality and fashion is Janine Antoni who looks at the gender disparity of body shape, fashion and social conditioning.

Janine Antoni combines both sculpture and performance and as such continues a long tradition that includes the Dadaists e.g. Meret Oppenheim's Spring Feast (1935) and the work of many of the Pop artists of the 1960s.

All Antoni's main projects have been performed in front of an audience. Typically, Antoni uses her own body to literally chisel, shape, colour and model the sculptures. In this way, Antoni pushes her body to extremes, employing eating, bathing, washing, and sleeping as sculptural processes.

“I am interested in objects like the nipple, lipstick, and soap because this is how we return to the body. These objects mediate our intimate interaction with our bodies. They define and locate the body within culture.”

Antoni has indicated a motivation with the feminist concerns of the cultural constructions of the female form; the necessity of women to label and be labelled by consumerism and socially conditioned to be obsessed with the ideal form. Associated with this are the detrimental, neurotic diseases such as bulimia and anorexia.

In the 1993 Venice Biennale, Antoni conducted a performance wherein she gnaws at a series of fourteen chocolate busts and washes with a series of soap sculptures (Lick and Lather 1993). Antoni is dealing with the notion of the ideal beauty and obsessive nature of cultural conventions. As the artist licks the chocolate sculptures and washes with the soap ones, they all change size and lose definition. The use of these materials serves to emphasise the ephemeral and malleability of the human form in the ageing process. The busts began to deteriorate after a week becoming repellent and filthy.

Chocolate Gnaw is a monolith of 275kg of chocolate and another of lard, which the artist chewed off and placed in a vitrine of illusionistic lipsticks (300 brand-name “Antoni Lipsticks”) and 34 heart shaped presentation boxes of chocolate which were ornamentally arranged. This served to examine the obsessive consumption and packaging that plague the Western world. However, the act of chewing and spitting has a profound and shocking effect on the audience and this became the overriding interpretation of the performance.

Vanessa Beecroft (New York) “NEW” V. 1995 Her performance artworks consist of a group of scantily clad or naked models silent, moving very little, rather like living pictures. (The performance lasts for two or three hours) These performances are documented by photographs and videos. The models are all women, anonymous in that they are all dressed the same. Tension is created by the breaking of taboos and ancient ideals of beauty, eroticism and shop mannequins. Neither the models nor the audience show any emotions, no comments are made.

“I am interested in the difference between what I expect and what actually happen.” (Beecroft)

“I will never forget how ravishing and creepy it all was” (Robert Rosenblum, New York Art critic 1998)

The subject is the female body: displayed made bluntly visible and immediate. The girls became the work itself, more powerful, more visual, and stronger. And the audience hated it, were outraged, rude.

Reference

Asburn, L. Lesbian Art: An encounter with Art Craftsman House 1996 Sydney.

Broude and Garrard The Power of Feminist Art Abrams 1994

Burkhard Art at the Turn of the Millennium p.66 Taschen

Chadwick, W. Women art and society T & H Lon 1994

Falkenstein, M.” What’s so good about being bad?” ARTnews Vol 98 no. 10 p158 Nov 1999

Garb, T. “Bodies of Modernity Figure, Flesh” in Fin-de-siecle France T & H Lon 1998

Holt, S. “Bad Attitude” World Art Vol. 1 No. 2 1994 p31

Marsh, A.R.T. Art Research Theory chapter 24 p.213. Oxford University Press Melbourne 1999

Out of Actions Between performance and the object 1949-1979 T&H Los Angeles 1998

Smee, S. Review of performance at MCA Sydney Morning Herald, August 1999

Note to teachers

Some of the material in the reference books and video is quite explicit and confronting as the intention of these artists has been to shock and confront the audience with the inequalities of a traditional patriarchal society. Alternatives could be used.