Ch 6. Woman as Sign- Psychoanalytic readings. Are Rossetti's paintings meaningless?
"mask of beauty"
"these were not faces, not portraits but fantasy" p168
"which function as a screen across which masculine fantasies of knowledge, power and possession can be enjoyed in a ceaseless play on the visible obviousness woman and the puzzling enigmas reassuringly disguised behind that mask of beauty" p170
"not as she is but as she fills his dream."- last line of Christina Rossetti poem (1856) p175
On Rossetti's 'Venus Verticordia':
'Flowers have often been used as a metaphor for women's sexuality, or rather their genitals. Here I suggest they function as a mataphor which simultaneaously acknowledges and displaces those sexual conotations covering or masking the sexualised parts of the body which are traditionally erased in the representation, even of Venus in western European art. But by covering up so excessively, the flowers draw attention both to what is absent and to the anxiety presence / absence generates in a masculine producer / viewer.' p186
'The meaning signified by this painting is not what is there but what is not, what cannot be articulated.'
'sexuality is vividly represented but in a displaced and over-anxious profusion of honeysuckles and roses which distract, mask, but signal what cannot be shown' p190
Visions of Sex Presentation: The Covered Body- Transcript.
The Covered Body
The issue of the body and sex is not related to an essential thing of the body, but to the way in which sexual difference (the bodies of men and women) are represented. Following examination of the exposed female body in various situations and forms of representation within this exhibition, this room aims to expand dialogue into the issue of the covered body, referring to the bodily gaze as a means of obliterating or enhancing perception of the female form.
The first two paintings are just one example of the development of ideas throughout the 19th to 20th centuries, addressing modes of female representation and gender issues. The excessive drapery typical of Victorian clothing within the painting by Augustus Egg reflects the very conservative ideas of bodily exposure during the era and in generations preceding it. Within Fini’s later reworking of The Travelling Companions the repressed sexuality of the excessively clothed bodies are somewhat revealed, yet Fini also takes her interpretation further by using the resolution of opposites, such as the sleeping / waking dichotomy typical of surrealist painting and the opposites of covered / exposed, to address alternative forms of androgyny.
The significance of clothing within the representation of female form has also been widely explored within feminist film theory, hence the decision to show Josef Von Sternberg’s film ‘The Devil Is A Woman’ (1935). Covering the body in the form of costume, and often in particular with veils, within sexually charged scenes and mixed gender meetings, as opposed to radically exposing it, highlights the attention which must be paid to the manipulation of the gaze and representations of sex through the veiling of the body and the masquerade which surrounds it.
In particular the relation which the covered/ exposed body has to power and threat must also be called into consideration; ‘Women covered or uncovered are still trapped in the contradictions of a law which confines them because the culture of men sees dangers all over their bodies if they escape confinement.’ (Veils Masks and Mirrors, Griselda Pollock, Correct Distance, Cornerhouse,1990)
Within the collection of photographs ‘ Women of Allah’ Shirin Neshat is perhaps raising the question of whether the chador can be used as a weapon to deflect the colonialist gaze ( a gaze which wants to know everything and understands very little). The covered body is hence subject to the notion of a radical denial of the gaze and the concomitant strategy of absence. It can be said that the veil is represented as a power to obliterate the gaze (either a gendered or a cultural one) and as a protecting curtain of the innate power existing beneath it.
The second television monitor within this room would show documentation of the performance ‘In Mourning and in Rage’ created by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz in reaction to the female rape victims of Los Angeles in the 70s. The use of veiling within a form of protest inevitably relates to the traditions of mourning and the idea of power existing within, yet has also been used as a uniform ritual enabling the women to come together as a collective statement of unity and aggressive action. The use of veils also enabled the artists to challenge common representations of women as the victim or potential victim within advertising, news and entertainment media, creating a uniform representation of the female form as powerful and somewhat threatening.
Laurie Anderson’s photo narrative installation ‘Fully Automated Nikon’ documents her process of photographing men whom made comments to her in the street. By capturing their image and then obliterating their gaze within the resulting image she is somewhat creating an alternative representation of the covered female. Her work highlights the place that the gaze has within the obliteration or enhancement of representation of the female form, and places an emphasis upon the dominance that the male observer has within ‘visions of sex’.
The issue of the body and sex is not related to an essential thing of the body, but to the way in which sexual difference (the bodies of men and women) are represented. Following examination of the exposed female body in various situations and forms of representation within this exhibition, this room aims to expand dialogue into the issue of the covered body, referring to the bodily gaze as a means of obliterating or enhancing perception of the female form.
The first two paintings are just one example of the development of ideas throughout the 19th to 20th centuries, addressing modes of female representation and gender issues. The excessive drapery typical of Victorian clothing within the painting by Augustus Egg reflects the very conservative ideas of bodily exposure during the era and in generations preceding it. Within Fini’s later reworking of The Travelling Companions the repressed sexuality of the excessively clothed bodies are somewhat revealed, yet Fini also takes her interpretation further by using the resolution of opposites, such as the sleeping / waking dichotomy typical of surrealist painting and the opposites of covered / exposed, to address alternative forms of androgyny.
The significance of clothing within the representation of female form has also been widely explored within feminist film theory, hence the decision to show Josef Von Sternberg’s film ‘The Devil Is A Woman’ (1935). Covering the body in the form of costume, and often in particular with veils, within sexually charged scenes and mixed gender meetings, as opposed to radically exposing it, highlights the attention which must be paid to the manipulation of the gaze and representations of sex through the veiling of the body and the masquerade which surrounds it.
In particular the relation which the covered/ exposed body has to power and threat must also be called into consideration; ‘Women covered or uncovered are still trapped in the contradictions of a law which confines them because the culture of men sees dangers all over their bodies if they escape confinement.’ (Veils Masks and Mirrors, Griselda Pollock, Correct Distance, Cornerhouse,1990)
Within the collection of photographs ‘ Women of Allah’ Shirin Neshat is perhaps raising the question of whether the chador can be used as a weapon to deflect the colonialist gaze ( a gaze which wants to know everything and understands very little). The covered body is hence subject to the notion of a radical denial of the gaze and the concomitant strategy of absence. It can be said that the veil is represented as a power to obliterate the gaze (either a gendered or a cultural one) and as a protecting curtain of the innate power existing beneath it.
The second television monitor within this room would show documentation of the performance ‘In Mourning and in Rage’ created by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz in reaction to the female rape victims of Los Angeles in the 70s. The use of veiling within a form of protest inevitably relates to the traditions of mourning and the idea of power existing within, yet has also been used as a uniform ritual enabling the women to come together as a collective statement of unity and aggressive action. The use of veils also enabled the artists to challenge common representations of women as the victim or potential victim within advertising, news and entertainment media, creating a uniform representation of the female form as powerful and somewhat threatening.
Laurie Anderson’s photo narrative installation ‘Fully Automated Nikon’ documents her process of photographing men whom made comments to her in the street. By capturing their image and then obliterating their gaze within the resulting image she is somewhat creating an alternative representation of the covered female. Her work highlights the place that the gaze has within the obliteration or enhancement of representation of the female form, and places an emphasis upon the dominance that the male observer has within ‘visions of sex’.
Visions of Sex Presentation: The Covered Body-Research.
In Mourning and In Rage.....
A memorial event staged for mass media coverage on Tuesday 13th December 1977, Los Angeles. The event was created by artsist Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus in collaboration with Bia Lowe, women from the Woman's Building, Women Aagainst Viloence Against Women. Los Angeles Commissions on Assaults Against Women, and City Council woman Pat Russel.
The use of veiling within a form of protest inevitably relates to the traditions of mourning and to the idea of power exisiting within, yet has also been used as a uniform ritual enabling the women to come together as a collective statement of unity and aggressive action. The use of veils also enabled the artists to challenge common representations of the women as victim or potential victim within advertising, news and entertainment media, creating a uniform representation of the female form as powerful and somewhat threatening.
-analised through the reading of ' In Mourning and in Rage..., Frontiers: A Journal of Woman Studies, Vol 3,No 1 (Spring 1978) pp52-55.
Visions of Sex Presentation: The Covered Body- Research
'Correct Distance'- Mitra Tabrizian.
Correct Distance is a book of photographs by Iranian Artist (living in London) Mitra Tabrizian- but it is also considered a book about photographs and the politics of representation. Mitra Tabrizian develops ideas theoretically informed by Marxism, structuralism and pyschoanalysis ( those explored by Laura Mulvey on Film and Griselda Pollock on Painting) from the perspective of sexual and cultural difference within the medium of photography.
' Correct Distance offers a map of the ways in which the debate on sexual difference and photgraphic practice developed during the eighties. It is through this broader feminist porject, with its emphasis on the sexual politics of representation and the questions os desire and pleasure, that the work should be read' (Feminist Review, Roberta McGrath)
Notes from 'Veils, Masks and Mirrors, Griselda Pollock, Correct Distance (Cornerhouse 1990):
'I was struck by the unexpected force of a single figure, a veiled woman, covered from head to foot by her dark robe from which only a diamond shaped segment of her face escaped. She looks directly at us, framed off centre within the architectural geometry of a public building....This is neither a posed portrait of a politician, or the casual news shot of a political figure in her place of work - but a carefuly achieved effect in which the woman in present and concealed, protected from our gaze and looking straight at us. Does the veil disembody her and resit the fetishism typical of western representation of the female body, which Islam claims to honour by veiling? Or does it entice and confirm the mystery of what is hidden?'
'The enveloped figure is also a version of the masquerade of femininity- bearing a striking visual resemblance to Mrs Gorji. This time Mildred Pierce is a fictional character caught in that public world with a version of the veil- a feminine dress which conceals the seductive body the daughter flaunts before us but which heightens its threat. Women covered or uncovered are still trapped in the contradictions of a law which confines them because the culture of men sees dangers all over their bodies if ever they escape confinement' ( Riviere, quoted by Griselda Pollock in Veils, Masks and Mirrors)
'masculinity is identified with the pleasure of active looking and possession in fantasy by means of that gaze while femininity has become synonymous with exhibitionism- being looked at and being styled to attract and recieve the gaze. The look- or who looks- has thus become a means to discuss a formation of power, by means of the way looking and its regulation translates into visual codes both a social and a psychic organisation of sexual difference.'
'Women looking signifies danger and the castrating power of the femme fatale in horror films and film noir. Mitra Tabrizian seems to create the look as both aggressive, challenging and resistant.'
The complex layering of meaning, posititioning of characters and multidirectional nature of the gaze within Mitra Tabrizian's work plays a crucial part in questioning the masquerade in which our identities and sexualities and constructed and held.
'The game is not to strip away the veil and expose the truth- the lie of documentary photography and bourgeois realism. It is to know what masks we wear, to define the texts we perform and to accept the necessity for critical knowledge as the condition for new pleasures, a 'new langauge of desire.'
Visions of Sex Presentation: The Covered Body-Research.
Shirin Neshat - 'Women of Allah'
'feminist criticism of the chador and of what it symbolises- the severe repression of women, must not be seen in the context of Western Orientalism. The image of the veiled Muslim woman has long served as a metaphor for the national body. She is an enigma, whose unveiling symbolically justified the colonialist transgression.' (Shirin Neshat, published by the Serpentine Gallery, 2000)
'Women of Allah' raises the question of whether the chador can be used as a weapon to deflect the colonialist gaze.
'the notion of a radical denial of the gaze and the concomitant strategy of absence is extremely productive'
- use of metaphor and complex layers of meaning within her work is itself to be seen as a veil that falls across the picture.
Perhaps the point is to render visible the existence of a culture without simultaneously subjecting it to the mercy of the all-incorporating western gaze that wants to know everything and understands nothing.
The veil is used as a power to obliterate the gaze (either a gendered or cultural gaze) and as a protecting curtain of the innnate power existing beneath it.
Week 5 - The Monstrous and the Marvelous. "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory", Mary Russo.
"She (the other woman) is making a spectacle out of herself." - a specifically female danger.
The danger?- that of an exposure. In contrast to men whom can expose themselves as a deliberate and circumscribed act (in a similar way to the mating rituals of exotic birds)
Whereas female exposure is associated with inadvertency and loss of boundaries.
Two distinct models for spectacle of the female:
radical negation, silence, withdrawal and invisibility. V . femine performance, imposture and masquerade (purity and danger).
(also see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1996) http://http://www.bytrent.demon.co.uk/douglas00.html
It is these models which have suggested varying cultural politics for women, though they are also models which are not mutually exclusive. The bringing together of these strategies of female invisibilty . V. female exposure can help tackle questions of difference and the reconstruction or counterproduction of knowledge.
eg. The work of Bakhtin has translocated the following issues to the field of the social,constituted as a symbolic system:
bodily exposure / containment
disguise / gender masquerade
abjection/ marginality
parody / excess.
'The reintroduction of the body and categories of the body ( in the case of carnival, the grotesque body) into the realm of what is called the 'political' has been a central concern of feminism.' The relation between the symbolc and cultural constructs of femininity and womaness, and the experience of women, might be brought together towards a dynamic model of a new social subjectivity.' The early work of Julia Kristeva on semiotics andsubjectivity are a crucial aspect of this project.
http://http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Kristeva.html
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0078-7469(197710)12%3C41%3AJKSAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C
Why is it that taboos around the female body as grotesque (the pregnant body, the aging body, the irrecgular body) are seen as unruly when set loose in the public sphere?
Much of the early work on the "carnival" dates from the late 60s, 'when enactments of popular protest, experimental theatre and multimedia art were suggestive of the enerigies and possibilities of unlimited cultural and social transformation. ( ref to Cockfighting and Deep Game Play, Clifford Geertz)
" Temporary loss of boundaries tends to redefine social frames."
' The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place. On the contrary, it was a multivalent image that could operate, first, to widen behavioral options for women with and even outside of marriage,and second, to sanction riot and political disobedience for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower orders few formal means of protest. Play with an unruly woman is partly a chance for temporary release from the traditional and stable hierachy; but it is also part of the conflict over efforts to change the basic distribution of power within society.' - Natalie Davis
The image of the unruly woman can actually incite and embody popular uprisings. An example being the Wiltshire enclosure riots of 1641 when rioting men were led by male cross dressers who called themselves' Lady Skimmington'. Lady Skimmington embodies the dispised aspects of strong femininity and her subordinate position in society in highlighted, through the enactment of power reversal. From this there remain questions of enactment and gender layering-Are women who have taken on this role ( as opposed to men cross dressing) as effective as male cross dressers?- Or is it a clear case of sanctioned play for men?
Does this comic female style (eg, of Lady Skimmington) work to free women from a more confining aesthetic? Or are women again so identified with style itself thattheyare as estranged from its liberatory and transgressive effects, as they are from their own bodies as signs in culture generally?
In what sense can women really produce or make spectacles of themselves?
'In the everyday indicative world, women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive- dangerous, and in danger.'
The grotesque body, as according to Bakhtin, upon his reading of Rubelais, 'is the open, protruding, extending, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the Classical body which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspiration of bourgeois individualism - the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.
- consideration of the grotesque body as continuous process - "the body without beginning and without end", Helene Cixous
The danger?- that of an exposure. In contrast to men whom can expose themselves as a deliberate and circumscribed act (in a similar way to the mating rituals of exotic birds)
Whereas female exposure is associated with inadvertency and loss of boundaries.
Two distinct models for spectacle of the female:
radical negation, silence, withdrawal and invisibility. V . femine performance, imposture and masquerade (purity and danger).
(also see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1996) http://http://www.bytrent.demon.co.uk/douglas00.html
It is these models which have suggested varying cultural politics for women, though they are also models which are not mutually exclusive. The bringing together of these strategies of female invisibilty . V. female exposure can help tackle questions of difference and the reconstruction or counterproduction of knowledge.
eg. The work of Bakhtin has translocated the following issues to the field of the social,constituted as a symbolic system:
bodily exposure / containment
disguise / gender masquerade
abjection/ marginality
parody / excess.
'The reintroduction of the body and categories of the body ( in the case of carnival, the grotesque body) into the realm of what is called the 'political' has been a central concern of feminism.' The relation between the symbolc and cultural constructs of femininity and womaness, and the experience of women, might be brought together towards a dynamic model of a new social subjectivity.' The early work of Julia Kristeva on semiotics andsubjectivity are a crucial aspect of this project.
http://http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Kristeva.html
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0078-7469(197710)12%3C41%3AJKSAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C
Why is it that taboos around the female body as grotesque (the pregnant body, the aging body, the irrecgular body) are seen as unruly when set loose in the public sphere?
Much of the early work on the "carnival" dates from the late 60s, 'when enactments of popular protest, experimental theatre and multimedia art were suggestive of the enerigies and possibilities of unlimited cultural and social transformation. ( ref to Cockfighting and Deep Game Play, Clifford Geertz)
" Temporary loss of boundaries tends to redefine social frames."
' The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place. On the contrary, it was a multivalent image that could operate, first, to widen behavioral options for women with and even outside of marriage,and second, to sanction riot and political disobedience for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower orders few formal means of protest. Play with an unruly woman is partly a chance for temporary release from the traditional and stable hierachy; but it is also part of the conflict over efforts to change the basic distribution of power within society.' - Natalie Davis
The image of the unruly woman can actually incite and embody popular uprisings. An example being the Wiltshire enclosure riots of 1641 when rioting men were led by male cross dressers who called themselves' Lady Skimmington'. Lady Skimmington embodies the dispised aspects of strong femininity and her subordinate position in society in highlighted, through the enactment of power reversal. From this there remain questions of enactment and gender layering-Are women who have taken on this role ( as opposed to men cross dressing) as effective as male cross dressers?- Or is it a clear case of sanctioned play for men?
Does this comic female style (eg, of Lady Skimmington) work to free women from a more confining aesthetic? Or are women again so identified with style itself thattheyare as estranged from its liberatory and transgressive effects, as they are from their own bodies as signs in culture generally?
In what sense can women really produce or make spectacles of themselves?
'In the everyday indicative world, women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive- dangerous, and in danger.'
The grotesque body, as according to Bakhtin, upon his reading of Rubelais, 'is the open, protruding, extending, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the Classical body which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspiration of bourgeois individualism - the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.
- consideration of the grotesque body as continuous process - "the body without beginning and without end", Helene Cixous
Lecture Notes - Week 4
Hildegard Von Bingen ( 1098- 1179) and Mysticism.
Mysticism - Many forms existed in the 12th Century - as personal, very bodily experiences of God. Not limited to the experience of women, however they were the majority.
The Rupertsberg Scivias is the book of focus for this discussion. The book 'disappeared' from Dresden in WW2. Rupertsberg was one of Hildegard's convents.
'scivias' - know the ways of God.
Self Portrait- Hildegard receiving visions with her secretary Volmar.For Hildegard, knowing the ways of God was a very physical, Semitic experience. There is a degree of bodily presence in her work that you don't find in any other medieval work. Her visions consisted of sound and optical effects, bodily sensation of 'great joy and great pain', which were eccentric and personal. In response to these she created her own set of forms / language.
" to write not by the constraints of human composition but by what you see and what you hear."
Neither her writing, music or illustrations follow the norms. Yet at the time of creation her work was popular and well studied - neglect of her work only came later on.
-Her writing was considered, by herself, to be abysmal, hence the use of Volmar, her secretary.
-Some, now attribute her visions to migraines, such as Madeline Caviness.
- Her illustrations are closely tied to the words of the vision and also relate to the body / female sexuality and eroticism ( Hildegard's work on medical texts would have supplied similar imagery).
- Hildegard considered 'visions' and eroticism to exist within female bodies (winds existing in the womb illustrate this idea) - male sexuality was not greatly considered by Hildegard, as for her, eroticism could exist in the female body alone. Her illustrations somewhat eroticses both spiritual and sexual female experience.
- Hidegard talks of forms of gender ahead of her time- of the female becoming male and vis a versa.
- She talks of the fluidity of the body- eroticism flowing out of the female body and into other things.
- Spirituality / sexuality = pleasure and pain.
Childbirth = creation of the world / spirit compared to the Apocalypse in terms of pain levels.
This pain / pleasure relationship also present within her music - music jumping octaves (uncommon musical composition)
The 'Egg of Creation' - the universe. (From Scivias, in the Rupertsberg Codex, 12th Century,Cited in Alexander Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism, p. 120)
"Then I saw a huge object, round and shadowy. Like an egg it was pointed at the top... Its surrounding layer was bright fire (Empyreum). Beneath this lay a dark skin. In the bright fire hovered a reddish, sparkling fireball..."
Note: - earth at the centre, with flowing water and stones, Flames / winds circling the centre.
Ideas of eroticism spreading out from the womb relate to her ideas about the universe and can be seen within the above image.
'Moisture'- also very important = creation / pregnancy, 'the womb'
Creation = motion (repetition of the stars at the top create the effect of movement)
Images capture the physical experience - How do you capture noise?- the whirlwinds etc.
Stars - used in a number of ways - symbolic of those who inhabit creation.
The trinity - feathers, branches and straw' - shown as united in one column.
Order and structure in her images = layers of the universe / heaven.
Above image (ignore inserted text) - shows God at the cornerstone of heaven. An unknown being of wrath and wings- image suggests a tempestuous horrible noise.
The Creation of Eve (image not available). Hildegard still shows Eve to be created from Adams rib and is still shown to be responsible for the fall- though is clearly violated by evil.
Eve- shown as partly a cloud (containing stars)- holding all the world inside her.
Stars - stars of heaven = future race.
Hildegard talks of the fecundity of the female body and the fecundity of the creation of the universe.
"the greening coming to life"
- relation to the ground and to nature. Idea of disrupted cycles in nature disrupting humanity.
Above image = figure of the church as wisdom and body. A female form emiting a light- illuminating wings, with Virgin Mary's arms of flames.
Hildegard nutured the expression of femlae wisdom and song- she believed that men had already seen these things but failed to listen.
Lecture Notes - Week 3
-Galla Placidia
-Anicia Juliana
-St Polyeuktos
-Hagia Sophia
-Pulcheria
-St Theodosia
Summary: Galla Placidia 5th century Byzantine Empress, Anicia Juliana wanted to be an empress. Hagia Sophia was built by Emperor Justinian. Pulcheria and St Theodosia like others used images one way or another to affirm or undermine class status, identity and ideology. St Theodosia was patron saint of Byzantine Iconoclasm.
Galla Placidia
- potentially a slut, potentially kidnapped by the goths. Built up a wealthy city in Ravenna.
- This week's reading explains how Placidia used the image of Helena as a symbol of importance to both men and women
-Anicia Juliana
-St Polyeuktos
-Hagia Sophia
-Pulcheria
-St Theodosia
Summary: Galla Placidia 5th century Byzantine Empress, Anicia Juliana wanted to be an empress. Hagia Sophia was built by Emperor Justinian. Pulcheria and St Theodosia like others used images one way or another to affirm or undermine class status, identity and ideology. St Theodosia was patron saint of Byzantine Iconoclasm.
Galla Placidia
- potentially a slut, potentially kidnapped by the goths. Built up a wealthy city in Ravenna.
- This week's reading explains how Placidia used the image of Helena as a symbol of importance to both men and women
Hans Namuth's Photographs of Jackson Pollock - Week 1
Taken From: 'Mathieu Paints a Picture' by Fred Gross.
Namuth, Pollock in his studio, 1950
The collaboration between Namuth and Pollock has its roots in Namuth's knowledge of earlier projects involving Picasso. Namuth knew about Paul Haesaert's film "Visite á Picasso," shot in 1949 and released in spring 1950, in which Picasso paints on a vertical pane of glass, behind which the camera recorded the master in action.7 Pollock would probably not have seen illustrations from Haesaert's film, but he certainly would have seen the next best thing: Picasso's Space Drawings photographed by Gjon Mili and notonly widely published in 1950 but exhibited as well at The Museum of Modern Art. (figure 3).8
Mili's photograph of Picasso captures him drawing in space with a flashlight what appears to be a bull or a minotaur. The long exposure arrests Picasso's motions as one continuous, flowing line of light. The vertical, two-dimensional plane of the photograph, then, becomes the plane of the canvas. Picasso wears nothing but shorts and sandals, and has finished his gesticulations with the flashlight in a balanced, athletic crouch that emphasizes his physical agility. The light drawing, arrested for our eye by the long exposure, only exists by the intersection of photography, just as the gait of a running horse was proven by Muybridge to have all four hooves off of the ground simultaneously--information about movement unavailable to the naked eye. Movement through space and the duration of this movement are arrested and coded by the photograph. The phenomenological articulation of Picasso's movements become the sum of their parts; for Namuth's photographs of Pollock, this meant that the creation of art rests upon the articulation of that movement within the space of the studio frozen by the camera and reproduced in popular magazines like film stills.
Picasso’s Space Drawings, photograph Gjon Mili.
Through the Surrealists, Pollock developed an acute interest in psychoanalysis. In 1939, Pollock began four years of psychotherapy that would aid him in an identification with the growing interest in the themes of Jungian thought. Pollock identified with Jung's notion of a "collective unconscious" that all human beings share at a level of archetypal recognition.17 Jung's postulation of a "phenomenology of the self" fused tenets of psychoanalysis and phenomenology into a construction of the "self" (analogous the to the Freudian ego) whose unconscious was regulated by internal and external stimuli, creating a "field" of experience and a response to stimuli of which the conscious ego is but one part.18 The other part is an "extra-conscious" psyche whose "contents are impersonal and collective...form[ing]...an omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical quality or substrate of the psyche per se."19 For Pollock, Jung's thought seemed homologous with the mythic subject matter of American Indian ritual, which involved a process of engaging the tangible world to express the universal or mythological. Such a process for Pollock involved a fundamental reorientation of the role of the artist from that of the thinker to that of the "act-or."
Harold Rosenberg, for example, described this meaning as the transcription of an artist's inner emotions by means of a pictorial or sculptural "act." "A painting that is an act," Rosenberg wrote, "is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a moment in the inadulterated mixture of his life."20 Or, again, "Art...comes back into painting by way of psychology. As Wallace Stevens says of poetry, it is a process of the personality of the poet."21 Rosalind Krauss mentions that
For Rosenberg, the picture surface as a locus of gestural marks demanded that one look at it as a map on to which one could read the complexity of the artist's psychological condition--a physical transcription of the artist's inner self.23 Rosenberg's seminal article re-affirmed Steichen's encoding of the image of the artist as an isolated genius, but not as "le penseur," the inert and bearded demiurge. Rosenberg's "action painter" moved through his work and through the world, linking the body of the painter and his genius with the artwork itself. Thus the "inner life" of the painting is a physical register of the phenomenal experience of the painter, and a tangible articulation of his psychological, existential necessity.
http://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part/part8/articles/gross.html
Namuth, Pollock in his studio, 1950The collaboration between Namuth and Pollock has its roots in Namuth's knowledge of earlier projects involving Picasso. Namuth knew about Paul Haesaert's film "Visite á Picasso," shot in 1949 and released in spring 1950, in which Picasso paints on a vertical pane of glass, behind which the camera recorded the master in action.7 Pollock would probably not have seen illustrations from Haesaert's film, but he certainly would have seen the next best thing: Picasso's Space Drawings photographed by Gjon Mili and notonly widely published in 1950 but exhibited as well at The Museum of Modern Art. (figure 3).8
Mili's photograph of Picasso captures him drawing in space with a flashlight what appears to be a bull or a minotaur. The long exposure arrests Picasso's motions as one continuous, flowing line of light. The vertical, two-dimensional plane of the photograph, then, becomes the plane of the canvas. Picasso wears nothing but shorts and sandals, and has finished his gesticulations with the flashlight in a balanced, athletic crouch that emphasizes his physical agility. The light drawing, arrested for our eye by the long exposure, only exists by the intersection of photography, just as the gait of a running horse was proven by Muybridge to have all four hooves off of the ground simultaneously--information about movement unavailable to the naked eye. Movement through space and the duration of this movement are arrested and coded by the photograph. The phenomenological articulation of Picasso's movements become the sum of their parts; for Namuth's photographs of Pollock, this meant that the creation of art rests upon the articulation of that movement within the space of the studio frozen by the camera and reproduced in popular magazines like film stills.
Picasso’s Space Drawings, photograph Gjon Mili.Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock (figure 4) were taken in the summer and early fall of 1950 in Pollock's studio with the intention of mythologizing the already-infamous painter. Pollock had first appeared in a magazine in December 1947 when Time reported the opinion of Clement Greenberg, critic for The Nation, that Pollock was one of the three best American artists.9 Pollock appeared in Vogue in 1948, and twice in Life. In 1949, Life asked its readers, "Jackson Pollock: Is he the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?"10 The photographs and text seemed to indicate that the answer was "yes."11 During this period, Namuth made over 500 photographs, a black and white movie, and a color movie (with Paul Falkenberg), all of Pollock at work. These photographs and films are pivotal to reckoning Pollock as a mythical figure.12 Namuth's photographs of Pollock moving around the canvas on the floor of his studio served to confirm the persona of Pollock, which had been developed by numerous articles and photographs appearing in the mass media.13 Pollock sought non-traditional artistic sources such as Native American shamans to engage the space "between the easel and the mural,"14 but still was acutely aware of his position within the larger development of avant-garde painting, which had been abstracted into model form by Alfred Barr in 1936.15 In 1947, Pollock stated that "I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely."16 Due to the influx of influential European surrealists before or during the war, American artists like Pollock were forced to reconsider their approaches to art production. Disenchantment with political strife in Europe and a rejection of what was considered "decadent" classical aesthetic sources led both the Surrealists and American artists to search for non-western sources for their inspiration. The Surrealists's belief in the use of dreams, metamorphosis, and myth as subject matter for art radically altered the American artists's perception of what their own role as an artist should be. Barnett Newman looked at the art of Oceania and the pre-Columbian Americas, Pollock at Native American sand painting and shamanic ritual dance. Adolph Gottlieb examined prehistoric petroglyphs, and Mark Tobey was deeply influenced by Bahai and Zen. Such sources were romanticized by American artists to a degree; however, the tropes of such non-Western sources were not utilized to draw attention to these cultures, but to engage their "primitive power" as a means of circumventing the outmoded stylistic conventions of European art.
Through the Surrealists, Pollock developed an acute interest in psychoanalysis. In 1939, Pollock began four years of psychotherapy that would aid him in an identification with the growing interest in the themes of Jungian thought. Pollock identified with Jung's notion of a "collective unconscious" that all human beings share at a level of archetypal recognition.17 Jung's postulation of a "phenomenology of the self" fused tenets of psychoanalysis and phenomenology into a construction of the "self" (analogous the to the Freudian ego) whose unconscious was regulated by internal and external stimuli, creating a "field" of experience and a response to stimuli of which the conscious ego is but one part.18 The other part is an "extra-conscious" psyche whose "contents are impersonal and collective...form[ing]...an omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical quality or substrate of the psyche per se."19 For Pollock, Jung's thought seemed homologous with the mythic subject matter of American Indian ritual, which involved a process of engaging the tangible world to express the universal or mythological. Such a process for Pollock involved a fundamental reorientation of the role of the artist from that of the thinker to that of the "act-or."
Harold Rosenberg, for example, described this meaning as the transcription of an artist's inner emotions by means of a pictorial or sculptural "act." "A painting that is an act," Rosenberg wrote, "is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a moment in the inadulterated mixture of his life."20 Or, again, "Art...comes back into painting by way of psychology. As Wallace Stevens says of poetry, it is a process of the personality of the poet."21 Rosalind Krauss mentions that
In speaking this way, Rosenberg is equating the painting itself with the physical body of the artist who made it. Just as the artist is made up of a physiognomic exterior and an inner psychological space, the painting consists of a material surface and an interior which opens illusionistically behind that surface. This analogy between the psychological interior of the artist and the illusionistic interior of the picture makes it possible to see the pictorial object as a metaphor for human emotions that well up from the depths of those two parallel inner spaces.22
For Rosenberg, the picture surface as a locus of gestural marks demanded that one look at it as a map on to which one could read the complexity of the artist's psychological condition--a physical transcription of the artist's inner self.23 Rosenberg's seminal article re-affirmed Steichen's encoding of the image of the artist as an isolated genius, but not as "le penseur," the inert and bearded demiurge. Rosenberg's "action painter" moved through his work and through the world, linking the body of the painter and his genius with the artwork itself. Thus the "inner life" of the painting is a physical register of the phenomenal experience of the painter, and a tangible articulation of his psychological, existential necessity.
http://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part/part8/articles/gross.html
Helen Frankenthaler (1928 -) Week 1
Robinson's Wrap1974
Acrylic on canvas
5' 10" x 7' 10"
Private collection
Mountains and Sea1952
Oil on canvas
7' 2 5/8" x 9' 9 1/4"
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Seeing the Moon on a Hot Summer Day1987
Acrylic on canvas
8' 7 3/8" x 5' 4 1/4"
Private collection
Born in New York in 1928, Helen Frankenthaler first studied with Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School. At Bennington College, Vermont, 1945-49, she received a disciplined grounding in Cubism from Paul Feeley, though her own instincts lay closer to the linear freedom of Arshile Gorky and the colour improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky's early work.
In 1950 the critic Clement Greenberg introduced her to contemporary painting. During that summer, she studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1951 Adolph Gottlieb selected her for an important New Talent exhibition, and she had her first one person show in New York later that year.
The work of Jackson Pollock proved the decisive catalyst to the development of her style. Immediately appreciating the potential, not fully developed by Pollock, of pouring paint directly onto raw unprimed canvas, she thinned her paint with turpentine to allow the diluted colour to penetrate quickly into the fabric, rather than build up on the surface. This revolutionary soak-stain approach not only permitted the spontaneous generation of complex forms but also made any separation of figure from background impossible since the two became virtually fused a technique that was an important influence on the work of other painters, particularly Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
- From 125 Masterpieces from the Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Critical Text: 'Mountains and Sea'
Text from Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings.
The Frankenthaler retrospective opens, appropriately enough, with the famous Mountains and Sea of 1952, a painting too beautiful, to use an old fashioned word, to regard merely as a historical moment in the march forward of the modernists, and too compelling, as beauty always is, to see only as a work that influenced some important artists to begin staining canvas. It is beyond question big with a future that would have been invisible when it was made, and so for us big with a past, momentous in the style wars of thirty something years ago. But it is worth the effort to try to see it as it must have been seen before the later history happened, as a cool composition of slender loops passing in and out of diaphanous washes of color pale greens and blues and pinks distantly Cubist but feminized, without the harsh angles, aggressive edges, and dangerous vertices. It is like a dance of seven veils.
As a matter of biography, Mountains and Sea was inspired by a trip to Nova Scotia, but it could as easily be seen as a still life rather than a landscape or not read referentially at all. The picture in the catalogue looks as if it could be a reproduction of an aquarelle. The great achievement, here as in the work that followed it for nearly a quarter century, consists of Frankenthaler's adaptation of the fluidity and transparency of washes over drawn lines, and the luminosity of thin glazes without the fat opacities of oil paint, to the scale of the large canvas, then the format of the Abstract Expressionists. But it would be a wonderful painting even if it had had none of its subsequent influence, and there are passages in it I cannot see too frequently. The string of drips in the upper right corner, for example, allow an archipelago of vibrant dots to form, the brush having discharged its delicate load and then, perhaps, descended to make the streak of pale blue in which the archipelago reappears, faintly, as a dot and then another paler dot. That is as beautiful as painting gets.
M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online, Feminist Art: A Reassessment
Edited by Susan Bee & Mira Schor
A forum including writing and images by artists and art historians from three generations.
Irina Aristarkhova, Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein, Johanna Burton, Ingrid Calame, Maura Coughlin, Bailey Doogan, Johanna Drucker, Carol Duncan, Mary Beth Edelson, Joanna Frueh, Vanalyne Green, Mimi Gross, Susanna Heller, Janet Kaplan, Tom Knechtel, Judith Linhares, Lenore Malen, Ann McCoy, Adelheid Mers, Robin Mitchell, Carrie Moyer, Beverly Naidus, Rachel Owens, Sheila Pepe, Nancy Princenthal, Carolee Schneemann, Mira Schor, Joan Snyder, Anne Swartz, Faith Wilding, and Barbara Zucker.
http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/04/
A forum including writing and images by artists and art historians from three generations.
Irina Aristarkhova, Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein, Johanna Burton, Ingrid Calame, Maura Coughlin, Bailey Doogan, Johanna Drucker, Carol Duncan, Mary Beth Edelson, Joanna Frueh, Vanalyne Green, Mimi Gross, Susanna Heller, Janet Kaplan, Tom Knechtel, Judith Linhares, Lenore Malen, Ann McCoy, Adelheid Mers, Robin Mitchell, Carrie Moyer, Beverly Naidus, Rachel Owens, Sheila Pepe, Nancy Princenthal, Carolee Schneemann, Mira Schor, Joan Snyder, Anne Swartz, Faith Wilding, and Barbara Zucker.
http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/04/
Notes: Cockfighting and Other Parades: Gesture, Difference and the Staging of Meaning (Griselda Pollock)- Week 1
Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match circa 1784-6
Oil on canvas
support: 1039 x 1500 x 20 mm frame: 1235 x 1695 x 85 mm painting
Summer time, Jackson Pollock
Lee Krasner, Gothic Landscape.Feminist inquiry being to: read beyond painting as discrete aesthetic objects and interrogate ‘that expanded set of relations of making and viewing, seeing and reading that the term artistic tries to encompass.’
The founding essay in cultural anthropology by Clifford Geertz ( Deep play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, 1973) is used as a focus point for the development of the inquiry, alongside Johanm Zoffany’s ‘ Coonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, 1784, and the work of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
Using the presence ( / absence) of Lee Krasner in Namuth’s film documenting Jackson Pollock, Griselda Pollock looks to go beyond merely noting the marginalisation of the feminine within the binaries; centre / periphery; masculine/ feminine; coloniser/ colonised.
The space for the production / process of sexual / cultural differencing is not the iconographic or compositional content within the image – it lies in the psycho- symbolic relation in which the work of the painting is engaged with by the work in the space / act of viewing.
Zoffany’s painting encodes the staging of a spectacle complete with spectator.
‘Difference is not attribute but relation; difference is not essence but play’ (in ref to Derrida)
Homi Bhabha’s double movement of governmentality highlights that it is not merely sexual difference alone that can be bought into play within this discourse. We must ‘grasp that the body is ‘always simultaneously inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.’ The play between sexual and cultural difference exists within the constructions of governmentality and desire.
The mixed economy of power and desire can be tracked in reference to ‘Colonel’s Mordaunt’s Cock Match’ and ‘Summertime’ via two pathways:
1.Gesture – as a point of comparison.
2.Consideration of the painting as text ( as staging of meanings that imply and create relations between the represented bodies and the viewing subjects, at a level beyond iconography or social decoding)
‘Paintings actively perform something on behalf of the culture that produces them.’
similarly to theatre, in which ‘thoughts are structured by narratives, performed by bodies adopting the body as the means for the evocation of deeply structured associations that inflect the formally articulated meanings’.
‘the body evokes structured associations that inflect formally articulated meanings.’
Gesture in relation to theatrical performance: 'theatrical performance changes the viewer through the play of dramatic emotions and a sequence of signifying gestures that the viewer not only sees but indentifies with in her / his own embodies person.’
‘representation has the making and remaking of subjectivity.’
Definition of subjectivity: not private and exclusive but is constantly being fashioned and reworked by encounter with representation and language through cultural practices.
Visual representation dramatises and produces issues concerning self perception and identity, as well as ideas relating to social life and conflicts.
Cultural representations of sexuality and sexual difference are never far from the relations of power, domination and discourse.
Study of the practices (gestures) of abstract painting in their aesthetic and material specificity can enable ‘a fluid and productive reading of fixing of identity and gender to artists as ‘men’ and ‘women’.’
Why were women marginalised from the movement of American Modernism?
Relativity to the era- shift in sexual difference, from the wartime working woman to the idealised homemakers of the 1950s.
Consideration of ‘the play of subjectivity through the privileging of the gesture’ with the gesture as an ‘index of both an embodiment and a psycho-sexual subjectivity, neither of which are synonymous with anatomies or socially specified genders.’
Proposition of two questions:
1.Is the gesture male?
Based upon the idea of Pollock’s drip paintings as the ‘metaphorics of masculinity’
Gesture (manner of painting and movement of bodily ego) ― fantasmatic subjectivity
Gesture should not be read as an index of what our culture already projects as typical gender characteristics of masculine and feminine behaviour or psychology.
What aspects of the differences between the fantasy worlds of sexual difference might be revealed through the art practical specificities of New York Modernism?
‘Instead of typical oppositions of phallic masculine aggressivity and smooth flowing feminine passivity, signalled by two methods of painting, the drip and the stain, I pondered what of feminine violence, anxiety, sadism, envy and desire?... How will these forces find gestures that can encompass and translate their inchoate formless pulse into visibility through an art work?’
2.Is the artist hysterical?
The hysteric: posing a radical doubt about the fixities of socially sanctioned sexual identity. The hysteric asks: "Am I a Man or a Women?", "Am I alive or dead?"
hysterical = capable of identifying across assigned bodily and linguistic gender.
Therefore,' if the artist is hysterical, creativity might be seen to stem from indentifications that transend the actual gendered embodiment of the artist.'
In order for the female to be an artist, rather than a mother, she must move away from the constructions of the femine child, culturally encouraged to identify with the mother, and identify with the masculine position of the son / artist, the patriarchal culture alone defines as Artist.
Cross gender accessibility - perhaps a key to creativity (working from greater understanding and experience of the world). New artistic forms can be created through the actions of the woman as artist.
'The femininity of the artist and the fantasy of the maternal sublimated within creative activity would be articulated through new artistic forms.'
'The point is to expose the fluidity of unconscious indentifications and relieve the apparent fixity of given social gender so as to reveal artistic practice as the site of both the ideological production of sexual difference as a set of oppositions (male/female) and as the perpetual erosion of fixed identities.'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A painting, producing itself to be read as a (re)staging is both productive and transformative for the producer and the viewer that reads it.
How do Summertime and Colonel Mordaunt's Cockmatch relate to each other?
'Deep play: notes on a Balinese Cockfight' by Clifford Geertz allows us to read culture as a symbolic staging enactment, choreography of both sexual difference and social heirachy. Consideration of game play as a form of cultural conditioning: with cultural and social significance made apparent in forms of game play (ie. cockfighting)
- consideration of the similarities between male and female behaviour
'cocks can thus become both the real and the metaphorical signification of the masculine self.'
'the cockfight, especially the deep cockfight is fundamentaly a dramatization of status.' (Geertz)
'The fights cause daily humiliation and triumph without actually shifting anyone's real status.'- everyday experience / cultural meaning becomes more powerfully articulated through the cockfight.
'The event is thus image, metaphor, and fiction that allows what is shown, or what takes place, to represent for the masculine participants the social passions and tensions through blood, feathers and money.'
Tensions in social status that are normally obscured become visible in an aesthetic and kinetic form.
'The dramatic metaphor captures, better than the usual notions of the passively consumed visual image, the experience of 'sentimental, that is emotional and psychological, education, that is coming to some kind of knowledge'.' - the act reveals half-known, hidden inner knowledge through experience of the sentimental.
'art forms gnerate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display.'
Notes: Why have there been no great women artists? (Linda Nochlin)
The white western male view point, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian and therefore the construction of the male dominated art historical canon - it is this canon which therefore needs to be challenged.
'A feminist critique of the discipline of art history is needed which can pierce cultural- ideological limitations, to reveal biases and inadequacies, not merely in regard to the question of women artists, but in the formulation of the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole.'
'This so called woman question can become a catalyst, a potent intellectual instrument, probing at the most basic and 'natural' assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning.'
Former differencing of women artists from men which asserts them to have a different kind of greatness for art , such as a recognisable feminine style posted on 'the unique character of a women's situation and experience', is not a sufficient argument for explaining why female art has not been catalogued at the same level as the work of men.
There is no strong evidence to suggest that 'subtle essence of femininity' connect the work of female artists over anything else. 'In every instance, women artists and writers would seems to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than there are to each other.' This so called feminine style can perhaps be attributed to a greater extent to the era of certain styles, such as the rococo style of eighteenth-century France. 'If women have at times turned to scenes of domestic life or children, so have the Dutch Little Masters, Chardin, and the impressionists - Renoir and Monet, as well as Morisot and Cassatt.'
In the founding of such an argument there is a general misconception of what art actually is : that it is 'the direct personal expression of individual emotional experience - a translation of personal life into visual terms.' 'Yet art is almost never that; great art certainly never.' Style is discovered through artistic progression rather than innate within the inner self.
In some areas women have achieved equality, whether it be in literature or dance, however, why is it that women have not achieved such status within fine art?
The 'whole crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great art' is one to be investigated- in which analysis of the 'institutionally-oriented approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based.'
So what are the conditions, generally productive of great art?
1. The concept of the Great Artist as Genius, with the discovery of artistic talent found in boys at a young age. The myths surrounding such a belief have , despite art historians pooh-poohing such sort of mythology about artistic achievement, been retained as the unconscious basis for their scholarly assumptions - claiming that "If women had the golden nugget of artistic genius, it would reveal itself."
2. Failure in the past to fully acknowledge the power of which father-son inheritance of profession has had in the fostering of male artistic talent. The historical pattern of male dominant occupations has been kept alive by this bloodline, with the opportunity for women to enter the field of such a profession less likely.
3. In questioning 'Why have there been no great women artists?' one can also consider 'Why have there been no great artists from aristocracy? Aristocracy rarely contributed any work into the sphere of Art, despite educational and leisure advantages- with women only dabbling in art as a means of showing themselves to be accomplished suitors.
'Could it be possible that genius is missing from the aristocratic make-up in the same way that it is from the feminine psyche?' But of course, it is perhaps more likely that the kinds of demands placed on aristocrats and women, such as social engagements, prevented both parties from being able to fully engage and contribute to the art world. General social situations and institutionalised implications need to be considered in regards to the 'Why have there been no great women artists?' question, rather than just gendered assumptions. The notion of individual genius as innate is a notion which needs to be abandoned by scholars, in the construction of art historical canons.
4. The question of the nude- women's' exclusion from life drawing classes within all academic and art institutions, until the late 19th century, is a key disadvantage placed upon the progression of female artistic talent. ' To be deprived of this ultimate state of training meant to be deprived of the possibility of creating major art.'
5. Other dimensions of the situation such as the apprenticeship system and the academic educational pattern - largely exclusive of women, also need to be accounted for. The fact that development in art-making has 'traditionally demanded the learning of specific techniques and skills in a certain sequence, in an institutional setting outside the home' has meant that house bound , homemaking women have been more readily excluded from this education- more so than for the female poet or novelist, in which the work can be created from the home.
6. The Lady's Accomplishment- art making seen as a 'self-demeaning level of amateurism' - a suitable "accomplishment" for the well-brought-up young women. 'Women were warned against the snare of trying too hard to excel in any one area.
'To be able to do a great many things tolerably well, is of infinitely more value to a woman than to be able to excel in any one. By the former she may render herself generally useful; by the latter she may dazzle for an hour.'
(In Mrs Ellis's widely read The Family Monitor and Domestic Guide.'
Painting and drawing was seen as a kind of therapy which "keeps them out of trouble" (the comment of a young doctor about his wife, of about 100 years ago). 'For such men, the "real" work of women is only that which directly or in-directly serves them and their children.'
Successes.
What qualities characterise successful women artists?
'Almost all women artists were either the daughters of artist fathers or... had a close personal connection with a strong or dominant male artist.'
Women artists who have not come from this background still, often as is the case, tend to have supportive fathers, who are willing to support their independence.
'It is also by adopting.. the "masculine" attributes of single-mindedness, concentration, tenaciousness, and absorption in ideas and craftsmanship for their own sake, that women have succeeded, and continue to succeed in the world of art.'
Ref to: Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) - one of the most successful and accomplished women painters of all time.
- career was supported by her father's own feminist views.
- escaped social norms (ie. marriage) in order to achieve success, yet despite this still considered marriage to be "a sacrament indispensable to the organisation of society".
Conclusion
'Hopefully by stressing the institutional, or the public rather than the individual, or private, preconditions for achievement in the arts, we have provided a paradigm for the investigation of other areas in the field.'
'What is important that women face up to the reality of their history and of their present situation. Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intellectual position.' Rather using their situation as under-dogs and outsiders as a vantage point, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general.'
'A feminist critique of the discipline of art history is needed which can pierce cultural- ideological limitations, to reveal biases and inadequacies, not merely in regard to the question of women artists, but in the formulation of the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole.'
'This so called woman question can become a catalyst, a potent intellectual instrument, probing at the most basic and 'natural' assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning.'
Former differencing of women artists from men which asserts them to have a different kind of greatness for art , such as a recognisable feminine style posted on 'the unique character of a women's situation and experience', is not a sufficient argument for explaining why female art has not been catalogued at the same level as the work of men.
There is no strong evidence to suggest that 'subtle essence of femininity' connect the work of female artists over anything else. 'In every instance, women artists and writers would seems to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than there are to each other.' This so called feminine style can perhaps be attributed to a greater extent to the era of certain styles, such as the rococo style of eighteenth-century France. 'If women have at times turned to scenes of domestic life or children, so have the Dutch Little Masters, Chardin, and the impressionists - Renoir and Monet, as well as Morisot and Cassatt.'
In the founding of such an argument there is a general misconception of what art actually is : that it is 'the direct personal expression of individual emotional experience - a translation of personal life into visual terms.' 'Yet art is almost never that; great art certainly never.' Style is discovered through artistic progression rather than innate within the inner self.
In some areas women have achieved equality, whether it be in literature or dance, however, why is it that women have not achieved such status within fine art?
The 'whole crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great art' is one to be investigated- in which analysis of the 'institutionally-oriented approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based.'
So what are the conditions, generally productive of great art?
1. The concept of the Great Artist as Genius, with the discovery of artistic talent found in boys at a young age. The myths surrounding such a belief have , despite art historians pooh-poohing such sort of mythology about artistic achievement, been retained as the unconscious basis for their scholarly assumptions - claiming that "If women had the golden nugget of artistic genius, it would reveal itself."
2. Failure in the past to fully acknowledge the power of which father-son inheritance of profession has had in the fostering of male artistic talent. The historical pattern of male dominant occupations has been kept alive by this bloodline, with the opportunity for women to enter the field of such a profession less likely.
3. In questioning 'Why have there been no great women artists?' one can also consider 'Why have there been no great artists from aristocracy? Aristocracy rarely contributed any work into the sphere of Art, despite educational and leisure advantages- with women only dabbling in art as a means of showing themselves to be accomplished suitors.
'Could it be possible that genius is missing from the aristocratic make-up in the same way that it is from the feminine psyche?' But of course, it is perhaps more likely that the kinds of demands placed on aristocrats and women, such as social engagements, prevented both parties from being able to fully engage and contribute to the art world. General social situations and institutionalised implications need to be considered in regards to the 'Why have there been no great women artists?' question, rather than just gendered assumptions. The notion of individual genius as innate is a notion which needs to be abandoned by scholars, in the construction of art historical canons.
4. The question of the nude- women's' exclusion from life drawing classes within all academic and art institutions, until the late 19th century, is a key disadvantage placed upon the progression of female artistic talent. ' To be deprived of this ultimate state of training meant to be deprived of the possibility of creating major art.'
5. Other dimensions of the situation such as the apprenticeship system and the academic educational pattern - largely exclusive of women, also need to be accounted for. The fact that development in art-making has 'traditionally demanded the learning of specific techniques and skills in a certain sequence, in an institutional setting outside the home' has meant that house bound , homemaking women have been more readily excluded from this education- more so than for the female poet or novelist, in which the work can be created from the home.
6. The Lady's Accomplishment- art making seen as a 'self-demeaning level of amateurism' - a suitable "accomplishment" for the well-brought-up young women. 'Women were warned against the snare of trying too hard to excel in any one area.
'To be able to do a great many things tolerably well, is of infinitely more value to a woman than to be able to excel in any one. By the former she may render herself generally useful; by the latter she may dazzle for an hour.'
(In Mrs Ellis's widely read The Family Monitor and Domestic Guide.'
Painting and drawing was seen as a kind of therapy which "keeps them out of trouble" (the comment of a young doctor about his wife, of about 100 years ago). 'For such men, the "real" work of women is only that which directly or in-directly serves them and their children.'
Successes.
What qualities characterise successful women artists?
'Almost all women artists were either the daughters of artist fathers or... had a close personal connection with a strong or dominant male artist.'
Women artists who have not come from this background still, often as is the case, tend to have supportive fathers, who are willing to support their independence.
'It is also by adopting.. the "masculine" attributes of single-mindedness, concentration, tenaciousness, and absorption in ideas and craftsmanship for their own sake, that women have succeeded, and continue to succeed in the world of art.'
Ref to: Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) - one of the most successful and accomplished women painters of all time.
- career was supported by her father's own feminist views.
- escaped social norms (ie. marriage) in order to achieve success, yet despite this still considered marriage to be "a sacrament indispensable to the organisation of society".
Conclusion
'Hopefully by stressing the institutional, or the public rather than the individual, or private, preconditions for achievement in the arts, we have provided a paradigm for the investigation of other areas in the field.'
'What is important that women face up to the reality of their history and of their present situation. Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intellectual position.' Rather using their situation as under-dogs and outsiders as a vantage point, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general.'
Seminar Notes - Week 2
The Image – what do we actually see?
-The gaze of the King and Queen being reflected back into the image.
-Representation of a space .Back of the frame of the canvas being an indicator towards the idea of space beyond the visible plane of the painting – towards other realms of representation
-This is a painting – a representation of something.
-The painting privileges the viewer – replacing the king and queen in the position of power.
-Painting commissioned by the powers to represent something of the sovereign.
-How is the space, in the painting, structured?- nice link to the MOMA article.
-Everything acting as a pendulum, an oscillation (the movement of the artist, man in the background, reflection in the mirror.
-Painting not just set in a studio space- the subject space is a space of representation.
-Figure of the small girl (centre) in a position of power (posture) yet not recognised by anyone else in the frame of the painting. Is the painting really about her?
-Las Meninas = ‘the girls’ title suggest the painting is about the group of women, yet this is not an interpretation which many give.
-Dissecting something to understand the positions of power- challenges the history of looking at paintings.
-The gaze of the King and Queen being reflected back into the image.
-Representation of a space .Back of the frame of the canvas being an indicator towards the idea of space beyond the visible plane of the painting – towards other realms of representation
-This is a painting – a representation of something.
-The painting privileges the viewer – replacing the king and queen in the position of power.
-Painting commissioned by the powers to represent something of the sovereign.
-How is the space, in the painting, structured?- nice link to the MOMA article.
-Everything acting as a pendulum, an oscillation (the movement of the artist, man in the background, reflection in the mirror.
-Painting not just set in a studio space- the subject space is a space of representation.
-Figure of the small girl (centre) in a position of power (posture) yet not recognised by anyone else in the frame of the painting. Is the painting really about her?
-Las Meninas = ‘the girls’ title suggest the painting is about the group of women, yet this is not an interpretation which many give.
-Dissecting something to understand the positions of power- challenges the history of looking at paintings.
Old Mistresses Lecture Notes- Week 2 (Griselda Pollock)
Feminist analysis – looking at the whole history of art in a new way – not restricted by former categories, such as style in relation to era. Not recreating a monograph approach to female artists.
Two considerations:
1. Allowing men and women into the field as players.
2. gender- not just tied up with men and women, part of culture on a wider scale, with cultural divisions and social structures enabling / disenabling gendered alternatives.
Standard histories of art don’t see art as a way of thinking about the world, adopts a practice very specific to particular practices, ie. Painting. The study of art should not just be about the materiality / the medium (the pigment etc)
How have people thought the world through forms of representation?
Painting: one of the major way in which people thought – the artistic discipline with the greatest cultural dominance. The modern alternative perhaps now being cinema and installation.
Why did painting become the dominant practice for the development of thought?
Image 1 . Diego De Silver Valasquez (1599-1660), Self portrait.
Self portrait of an artist- already a statement making the proposition of the I-ness of an artist. Linked to the development of authorship as a significance.
Concept of perpetual movement of the gaze.
Male standing-upward force.
Queen Isabel
1632
Oil
132 x 101.5 cm
Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
Confines of the skirt- boxed in
set face- restricted.
Prince Felipe Prospero 1659 Oil 128.5 x 99.5 cm
Infanta Margarita
c. 1656
Oil105 x 88 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Representation of children – formality of the baby body. With structured garments acting as a strength against the fragility of the child’s body. Shows children entering into a marked out gendered world.
How do you embody . signify power?
Also relevant to landscape painting – a form which simultaneously shows itself as a painting and as a world with the painting oscillating backward and forwards between these two things. You can’t see the world without seeing the paint.
Velasquez
Marsc. 1639-41Oil181 x 99 cmMuseo del Prado, Madrid
Former militarised masculinity not present in the same way. An aging Mars, showing bare feet, who has pathetically left his helmet on. Seems lost in the darkness, in melancholy – completely undercutting what should be in his function.
Nonetheless, he is still upright (taking the masculine form) whilst Ve;asquez representation of Venus is along the horizontal plane.
Velasquez
Venus at Her Mirror ("The Rokeby Venus")
Two considerations:
1. Allowing men and women into the field as players.
2. gender- not just tied up with men and women, part of culture on a wider scale, with cultural divisions and social structures enabling / disenabling gendered alternatives.
Standard histories of art don’t see art as a way of thinking about the world, adopts a practice very specific to particular practices, ie. Painting. The study of art should not just be about the materiality / the medium (the pigment etc)
How have people thought the world through forms of representation?
Painting: one of the major way in which people thought – the artistic discipline with the greatest cultural dominance. The modern alternative perhaps now being cinema and installation.
Why did painting become the dominant practice for the development of thought?
Image 1 . Diego De Silver Valasquez (1599-1660), Self portrait.
Self portrait of an artist- already a statement making the proposition of the I-ness of an artist. Linked to the development of authorship as a significance.
Concept of perpetual movement of the gaze.
viewer = seeing someone seeing – meeting the gaze (encountering the power of the gaze)
When we look at it we see a representation of the gaze.
Viewer found in the secondary space that the painting produces.
Reference to the history of covered paintings / veiled religious icons – the idea that one only meets the gaze of the subject at particular moments. Something has happened in the history of painting to open up the painting to viewing.
Valasquez is a pivotal figure in the history of painting – he creates work where we begin to see the pivotal motion of the gaze, with the viewer animating the life of the image. The images call upon the viewer to think subjective thought – invoking thoughts about life issues such as life and death.
16th / 17th Century marked a shift in the way of knowing things – as Foucault terms ‘the birth of classical representation’.
Painting exists not just as a set of illustrations, hence why it is difficult for us to say what we’re seeing.
Visibility / Invisibility
Space / question of space ]- all elements of painting.
The gaze
Velasquez – the court painter for Spain (Phillip IV) , so responsible for producing royal and sovereign images.
What is it that makes a sovereign body?
Velasquez attempts to find a visual representation in which you can experience the embodiment of power.
What are the rhetorics of representation that allow us to be in the presence of power?
The sovereign in very much represented in the masculine and the feminine (which is why portraits of Elizabeth I are so interesting)
Philip IV in Brown and Silver
c. 1631-32
Oil
199.5 x 113 cm National Gallery, London
When we look at it we see a representation of the gaze.
Viewer found in the secondary space that the painting produces.
Reference to the history of covered paintings / veiled religious icons – the idea that one only meets the gaze of the subject at particular moments. Something has happened in the history of painting to open up the painting to viewing.
Valasquez is a pivotal figure in the history of painting – he creates work where we begin to see the pivotal motion of the gaze, with the viewer animating the life of the image. The images call upon the viewer to think subjective thought – invoking thoughts about life issues such as life and death.
16th / 17th Century marked a shift in the way of knowing things – as Foucault terms ‘the birth of classical representation’.
Painting exists not just as a set of illustrations, hence why it is difficult for us to say what we’re seeing.
Visibility / Invisibility
Space / question of space ]- all elements of painting.
The gaze
Velasquez – the court painter for Spain (Phillip IV) , so responsible for producing royal and sovereign images.
What is it that makes a sovereign body?
Velasquez attempts to find a visual representation in which you can experience the embodiment of power.
What are the rhetorics of representation that allow us to be in the presence of power?
The sovereign in very much represented in the masculine and the feminine (which is why portraits of Elizabeth I are so interesting)
Philip IV in Brown and Silver
c. 1631-32
Oil
199.5 x 113 cm National Gallery, London
Male standing-upward force.Palpable, fresh, moist lips.
Queen Isabel
1632
Oil
132 x 101.5 cm
Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
Confines of the skirt- boxed inset face- restricted.
Prince Felipe Prospero 1659 Oil 128.5 x 99.5 cm
Infanta Margaritac. 1656
Oil105 x 88 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Representation of children – formality of the baby body. With structured garments acting as a strength against the fragility of the child’s body. Shows children entering into a marked out gendered world.How do you embody . signify power?
Also relevant to landscape painting – a form which simultaneously shows itself as a painting and as a world with the painting oscillating backward and forwards between these two things. You can’t see the world without seeing the paint.
Velasquez
Marsc. 1639-41Oil181 x 99 cmMuseo del Prado, Madrid
Former militarised masculinity not present in the same way. An aging Mars, showing bare feet, who has pathetically left his helmet on. Seems lost in the darkness, in melancholy – completely undercutting what should be in his function.Nonetheless, he is still upright (taking the masculine form) whilst Ve;asquez representation of Venus is along the horizontal plane.
Velasquez
Venus at Her Mirror ("The Rokeby Venus")
c. 1644-48Oil122.5 x 177 cm
National Gallery, London
Back view prevents the artist from having to represent the Venus Pudica pose.
Looking in the mirror- she bcomes the figure who is locked into the circular gaze – the virtual space in the painting for which the gaze can exist.
How does the painting produce the volume for this space – in or out of the painting?
Early and late paintings of Velasquez – exploring the potential for representing different worlds.
Foucault Essay
Starts with a description- looks systematically.
There is nothing in the painting that is not significant.
- Position – posture of the artist already inserts into the painting the act of looking between the artist and the canvas and the model (or the viewer – the subject of the artist’s gaze)
Through describing / tracking the painting we are working through what it is that the painting proposes.
The shell shape – creating volume in the space of the canvas.
Light
The mirror? – an image , of luminous quality showing two figures – the models(?)
The space within the frame of the painting consists of essentially four spaces: the back space (in which the silhouetted figure stands), the centre space, the forward space (reflected back into the centre / back space by the presence of the mirror, and then forward again) and the (imaginary) space contained within the artist’s canvas.
The viwer thinks that we are summoned to be the model in the construction, yet the mirror changes this.
It is the mirror which holds the representation of the sovereign body and the sovereign gaze.
Illustrating the moment in which the painter thinks what the next gesture he makes is is a moment that brings into being the making / production of the thought. Reminding us that representation is produced.
What method does Foucault give you for examining paintings?
- Descriptive element of great importance.
- Paintings anticipate being looked at.
- We must allow paintings to do their work
- We must try to see what the painting does
- We must recognise the level at which the painting works.
Back view prevents the artist from having to represent the Venus Pudica pose.
Looking in the mirror- she bcomes the figure who is locked into the circular gaze – the virtual space in the painting for which the gaze can exist.
How does the painting produce the volume for this space – in or out of the painting?
Early and late paintings of Velasquez – exploring the potential for representing different worlds.
Foucault EssayStarts with a description- looks systematically.
There is nothing in the painting that is not significant.
- Position – posture of the artist already inserts into the painting the act of looking between the artist and the canvas and the model (or the viewer – the subject of the artist’s gaze)
Through describing / tracking the painting we are working through what it is that the painting proposes.
The shell shape – creating volume in the space of the canvas.
Light
The mirror? – an image , of luminous quality showing two figures – the models(?)The space within the frame of the painting consists of essentially four spaces: the back space (in which the silhouetted figure stands), the centre space, the forward space (reflected back into the centre / back space by the presence of the mirror, and then forward again) and the (imaginary) space contained within the artist’s canvas.
The viwer thinks that we are summoned to be the model in the construction, yet the mirror changes this.
It is the mirror which holds the representation of the sovereign body and the sovereign gaze.
Illustrating the moment in which the painter thinks what the next gesture he makes is is a moment that brings into being the making / production of the thought. Reminding us that representation is produced.
What method does Foucault give you for examining paintings?
- Descriptive element of great importance.
- Paintings anticipate being looked at.
- We must allow paintings to do their work
- We must try to see what the painting does
- We must recognise the level at which the painting works.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)