From the Venus de Milo to Manet’s Olympia, the female nude is a subject that fascinates many artists. The portrayal of the female body has always been just that, a depiction of a nude female; and it was not until the second wave of feminism in the 1970s that challenged the way females had always been portrayed as an object to look at instead of artists. From Commodities to Artists is an exhibition that displays the rising significance of female artists within the study of art history during the 1960s and the 1970s. The artists and pieces included in the exhibition are Richard Hamilton’s $he (1958), Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962), Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May (1977), and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974). Each piece plays …show more content…
This is the first piece, not only because it is the earliest chronologically, but because it concentrates on the form of a women’s body placed in a domestic setting. Hamilton wrote “this relationship of woman and appliance is a fundamental theme of our culture.” He plays on the Western culture of social gender constructs and a woman’s role in the domestic realm in his work. He reduces the female figure to her basic components: her breasts, eyes, and hips. He exposes the societal construct that women are supposed to be fetishized by emphasizing her sexual and seductive body parts. He juxtaposes this ambiguous female with kitchen appliances set in the domestic realm. This suggests that women are supposed to stay in the domestic setting, and also basically be there as a sexual object for whoever owns the house. Even the title incorporates the dollar sign into the word ‘she,’ suggesting that the female portrayed is for sale. Linda Nochlin comments on older paintings where the subject is a female nude and describes the nude model as “naked-as-an-object,” referring to the fact that once the model is standing naked in front of male artists, she is no longer a women, but instead an object for them to fetishize and paint. Regardless if Hamilton used a female nude model as inspiration, or painted $he (1958) from the constructs of his mind, he is degrading the female body to another appliance found in the
In the great tradition of classical art, nudity and death have been two main themes of the masters. Sally Mann’s photographs twist this tradition when the nudes are her prepubescent children and the corpses are real people. The issue is that her photographs are a lens into unfiltered actuality, and consumers question the morality of the images based on the fact that children and corpses are unable to give legal consent. Her work feels too personal and too private. Mainly, people question whether or not Mann meant to cause an uproar with her work or if the results were completely unintentional. After looking through what Sally Mann herself has said, it can be determined that both options have a grain of truth. She wanted to provoke thought,
At the first glance of Conversation Piece, the image of a family of three relaxing near the dining table is shown.
Alice Neel's most talked about painting, a Self-Portrait of herself, shocked the world when she painted herself in the nude at the age of 80-years-old. Neel, a 20th Century American Portrait Artist, painted models for over 50 years before turning the attention to herself (Tamara Garb). Neel wasn't a pinup girl and had depicted herself as the complete opposite (Jeremy Lewison). Unlike Neel, women avoided self-portraits of themselves, and nude self-portraits barely made it to canvas (Tamara Garb). Because of these reasons alone, Neel's Self-Portrait attracted scrutiny (Jeremy Lewison). Though Neel declared the painting to be frightful and indecent (Ibid), it still directed its focus on femininity, and the challenges women had to endure in our
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society 3rd ed. (NY: Thames & Hudson world of art, 2002), 153-160.
In this essay I’ll be exploring various concepts of women and will deeply criticise the way women are seen and portrayed through advertising. My primary resource I’ll be referring to throughout this essay is a book called ‘Ways of seeing’ by John Berger, which highlights the role women during the early renaissance and onwards. In addition to this I will explore the various beliefs of women from a wide range of secondary resources, and will include references from books, websites, and various images to help clarify my statements.
In the past few years, advertisement has changed significantly, and with it bringing many changes to our current society. Susan Bordo, a modern feminist philosopher, discussed in her article “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body” how current society has changed starting with Calvin Klein’s advertising campaign that showed men wearing nothing but underwear. Bordo argues how men are becoming the subject of the gaze, just as women were for centuries. This argument of the gaze is especially pronounced in John McTiernan’s film The Thomas Crown Affair, which focuses on two main characters, a man named Thomas Crown, who is a billionaire Manhattan financier, and a woman named Catherine Banning, and insurance investigator who is investigating Crown’s robbery of the 100-million-dollar painting, the “San Giorgio Maggiore Soleil Couchant”. The film addresses Bordo’s modern feminine and masculine gaze to target a wide range of adult audience.
While flipping through the pages of a fashion magazine, my fingers stop abruptly as my eyes catch an image of a nude man holding a clothed woman. The man has a muscular body and is effortlessly supporting the woman who's body is arched backwards, her arms hang in a swan-like manner. On the ground by her left foot lays a paint palette and her right hand is grasping a paint brush. The room that they are in appears to be a studio with press board floors, brick walls, and old unfinished wooden workbenches draped in cloth. The woman is painting a canvas with the image of the nude man. The foreground consists of the artist and the model, the painting and the easel, a stool, and a table with art supplies spread out on top. In the background, to the right of the canvas, stands a life-size statue of a woman facing the wall. The statue is a generic image of Greek statues from around 400 - 200 BC. In the right bottom corner of the page, a bottle of golden perfume called Tabu is superimposed on the page. The caption written in cursive reads, "Blame it on Tabu".
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
Feminism and political issues have always been centered on in the art world and artists like to take these ideas and stretch them beyond their true meanings. Female artists such as Hannah Höch, who thrived during the Dada movement in the 1920s in Germany and Barbara Kruger who was most successful during the 1980s to 1990s in the United States, both take these issues and present them in a way that forces the public to think about what they truly mean. Many of Kruger’s works close in on issues such as the female identity and in relation to politics she focuses on consumerism and power. Höch, like Kruger, also focuses on female identity but from the 1920s when feminism was a fairly new concept and like Kruger focuses on politics but focuses more on the issues of her time such as World War I. With the technique of photomontage, these two artists take outside images and put them together in a way that displays their true views on feminism and politics even though both are from different times and parts of the world.
The author tells the reader story of the teenage girl, who’s suffering from difficulties in the relationship with surrounding her people, such as her friends and wax copy of the president Roosevelt, – “the only man who has ever called her pretty” (Coyle 366). Through all the story the reader can be a witness of the violence against the girl, for example, when Franklyn D. Roosevelt makes her cry for no reason (“She’s kneeling in a wax museum on her first date, crying…”), communicates in not appropriate way (“Send me a pic of ur boobs, says the third [message]”) (Coyle 366,368). In this case we can see not only typical violator’s behavior, but also the reaction, which majority of the women have: belief that “no one will ever love [her]” (Coyle
Her chief arguing points and evidence relate to the constriction of female sexuality in comparison to male sexuality; women’s economic and political roles; women’s access to power, agency, and land; the cultural roles of women in shaping their society; and, finally, contemporary ideology about women. For her, the change in privacy and public life in the Renaissance escalated the modern division of the sexes, thus firmly making the woman into a beautiful
She explains Kruger had a previous career in graphic design similar to Andy Warhol. Through her prior knowledge in graphics, Kruger was able to address her concerns of feminist issues through her own art. The paper discussed how Kruger used her designs to expose her own opinions and issues in relation to male power and the control they are able to gain over the bodies of women. Calak also discusses how Kruger critiques consumerism, stereotypes, and mass media influences. Calak explains Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)
Images that eroticism is implied tend to represent the availability of the women’s bodies, in the implication that they are objects of eroticism (Sturken and Cartwright 2009: 116), consequently affecting the way society views women such as illustrated in Figure
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
In Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power by Sandra Bartky, the writer examines the disciplinary practices which produces a body that gesture and appearance is feminine. Bartky challenges the social construction of femininity by revealing how feminine serves the interest of domination. She talks about apparatus of discipline, the disciplinarians that discipline. According to her, it is a system of micro power that is essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical. Taking into consideration one of the concepts of her analysis, feminine bodily discipline is something imposed on subjects and at the same time something that can be sought voluntarily. I will base my analysis on these dual characters and I will demonstrate that the production of femininity is more like something imposed