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Feminism in art critical essay
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Calak, Katherine. “BARBARA KRUGER, YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND.”CiteSeerX, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.617.2\506. Calak discusses Kruger’s feminist ideologies illustrated in her individualistic artistic style. Calak begins with explaining Kruger’s common artistic attributes such as the black and white imagery, red blocks of text, and addresses the specific attributes of Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground). 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) …show more content…
The online side of The Broad also gives an audio tour on the artist, this audio tour allows the viewer to hear more about the artwork from another standpoint. The speaker questions the subject and context of the artwork by asking “what is being fought over?” This question addresses the new wave of anti-abortion laws that swept the country in 1989. In this year, Kruger created Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground) in order to protest during the historic pro-choice march in Washington DC. The artwork reveals the reality of artworks and how they can not only have a political intent, but also move a crowd introduce opinions on the topic being addressed. The speaker also explains the form of the subject as well as connecting it to Uncle Sam’s recruiting message, but Kruger’s work is warning people of a threat rather than
-McTavish, Lianne “Body Narratives in Canada, 1968-99: Sarah Maloney, Catherine Heard, and Kathleen Sellars” in Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2 Fall 2000 - Winter 2001. pp. 5-20
There are many ways in which both Wes’s have taken steps down the right and wrong paths. They may have lived and grown up in the same cities, but they had different support systems and different events that made their destinies contrast. Perhaps if the Other Wes had a better support system, he could have gone down a much different path. From the very beginning, neither Wes had a father figure. Author Wes’s father dying from acute epiglottitis (which Wes witnessed) , and the Other Wes’s father leaving the picture. There is an occurrence where the Other Wes does come across his father, and neither of them know who each other are.”The strong smell of whiskey wafted from his clothes and pores. Wes and the man returned each other’s quizzical looks.”(25)
She attempts to address such issues as feminism, social dynamics, and other critical issues. She uses black and white photos overlaid with red coloring for accents (“Barbara Kruger Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.”). The photos are usually cropped, with only part of the photo in her work. For example, she may use a hand, or a face from a picture and then print carefully chosen words on top of it. Her work includes personal pronouns to question who is speaking. These works were further distributed on various material and media, such as T-shirts, posters, postcards, and more (“Barbara Kruger.”
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).
These specific ploys that are performed by the Guerrilla Girls are in the way they dress, the masks they wear, pseudonymous names of dead women artists and the witty factual evidence in their works. These are all examples to evoke audiences in challenging not only the art society which dictates the value and worth of women in art, but also to confront yourself and your own beliefs in a way that makes audiences rethink these growing issues. Over the last twenty years, the Guerrilla Girls have established a strong following due to the fact that they challenged and consistently exhibited a strong supportive subject matter that defies societal expectations. In an interview “We reclaimed the word girl because it was so often used to belittle grown women. We also wanted to make older feminists sit up and notice us since being anti- “girl” was one of their issues....
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.
Throughout history society has been controlled by men, and because of this women were exposed to some very demanding expectations. A woman was expected to be a wife, a mother, a cook, a maid, and sexually obedient to men. As a form of patriarchal silencing any woman who deviated from these expectations was often a victim of physical, emotional, and social beatings. Creativity and individuality were dirty, sinful and very inappropriate for a respectful woman. By taking away women’s voices, men were able to remove any power that they might have had. In both Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”, we see that there are two types of women who arise from the demands of these expectations. The first is the obedient women, the one who has buckled and succumbed to become an empty emotionless shell. In men’s eyes this type of woman was a sort of “angel” perfect in that she did and acted exactly as what was expected of her. The second type of woman is the “rebel”, the woman who is willing to fight in order to keep her creativity and passion. Patriarchal silencing inspires a bond between those women who are forced into submission and/or those who are too submissive to maintain their individuality, and those women who are able and willing to fight for the ability to be unique.
...continue, no matter how difficult. At the heart of In a Time of Violence is the need and responsibility to re-imagine and retell old stories that no longer work; to bring women closer together by doing away with the repressive female images—the beautiful heroine, the unseen seamstress— that saturate the current and past stories of our culture. By creating and retelling these stories, Boland explores what she has termed “the meeting place between womanhood and history”, and creates a communal discourse between all women who care to listen to her.
I am going to analyze this text using the intrinsic and feminist literary theory analysis. With the intrinsic analysis, I will brood mostly on the style and characterization of the text. According to Eaglestone, 2009, intrinsic analysis is a look into the text for meaning and understanding, assuming it has no connection, whatsoever, to the outside world. “Style is said to be the way one writes as opposed to what one writes about and is that voice that your readers hear when they read your work” (Wiehardt, n.d). The text uses mostly colors, poems and songs to deliver its messages. The main characters in the...
Being a women artist, displaying such an installation was not possible years back. Contrary to the opinions of many students new to the study of feminist literary Criticism, many feminists like men, think that women should be able to stay at home and raise children if they want to do so, and wear bras. Bringing such an art piece, reflection of her inner experiences or having sex in bed after having bad relationship could not be possible before. The main female characters are stereotyped as either “good girls” or “bad girls”. These classifications suggest that if a woman does not admit her male-controlled gender role, then the only role left her is that of a monster. Yet Emin’s confessional art- with its confidences of pregnancy, being raped, destructiveness of guilt, emotional stress- has become much common nowadays with feminist consciousness while in early generation, sharing such experiences lead to the destruction of women’s life. Her unmade bed, surrounded by such bric-bracs tells a story of a depressed, emotionally stressed women artist who asks for a sympathetic shoulder from the viewers by being a transparent soul. “For her British critics it [My Bed] expressed Emin’s sluttish personality and exemplified the detritus of a life quintessentially her own; it was, above all, confessional”, Cherry observes. Emin has limited the word ‘feminist; art practices have been the concerned of an early generation. This point seems to be confirmed by Emin herself, who declares to the discerning nature of her work in which she says that she decides to show either this or that part of the truth, which isn't unavoidably the whole story but it's just what she decides to gives us. As a self-motivated set of influences, feminism no longer titles a unitary or merging project infact it is now being the transformation just as feminist biases are perpetually subject to change. Whereas, looking at Tracey’s other work, Tent “Everyone I Have Ever
In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient we see a world completely ravaged by war. The land itself is damaged, sometimes beyond recognition as it is torn apart by bombs. Just as these human-made structures have faced the damage of imperialism, so have female bodies in the novel. Ondaatje creates several parallels between man’s attempt to “own” the land around him and his “ownership” of the female body. As we see in the novel, this attempt at ownership almost always ends in destruction, “war,” and often, death. What I believe Ondaatje is trying to present to us is the impossibility of “owning” something that should ultimately be free, such as the female body (or any body, for that matter.) Though some feminist theorists such as Lilijana Burcar have claimed Ondaatje’s novel perpetuates the idea of male ownership of female bodies, I believe we see several examples of female empowerment hidden throughout the novel; examples of females outwardly rejecting such “ownership,” as Hanna refuses to be seen as a sexual object by Carravagio, and even changes her appearance to “defeminize” herself. We even see gender-roles reverse. The “male gaze” seems to apply not only to males, but to females as well as Hanna views the sapper, Kip, in a “feminized” and often “sexual” way. Most striking of all, however, is Ondaatje’s representation of the character Katharine as an almost voiceless physical body which is undoubtedly “owned” and consumed by Almasy’s desire. As we see, this “ownership” leads to what is arguably the biggest destruction in the novel: the destruction of both Katharine and Almasy altogether.
It throws the ambiguity of the piece wide open and in doing so empowers women across all spheres, encouraging a confronting discussion about women, their bodies and their place in the world. Paintings such as Black Iris discuss that natural beauty is found in many forms, and as Seeberg (2002) notes, that a galaxy of ideas can be and that form can be incorporated into an individual object, which, can be viewed in many different ways and is always subjective to the viewer. Black Iris caused a commotion when it was first shown. A woman producing a body of work that resembled, according to the Freudian mind, female genitalia, of which as Breedlove (1986) discusses was deeply upsetting to O’Keeffe as the artwork was more often than not critiqued with what the artworks said about her rather than the work in general.
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. Excerpt from K. Conboy, N. Medina, and S. Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (401-17). NY: Columbia University Press, 1997. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. A. & Co.
In her writing female identity is a product of the ideological history that surrounds it, she describes female subjectivity in terms of fragmentation, displacement,...