'Don't consider yourself a feminist?'

Sex offenders/Lad's mags

I want to do performance art!

These are some of the photos of people that responded to me with my body mannequin. I initially wore it around town, but felt that I wasn't achieving as much as I had hoped. Well, I was definitely getting a great amount of strange looks, as anticipated! So I decided to interact with people and talk about the issue I was attempting to visualise. It was interesting hearing people's reactions, and realising that there are so many factors that contribute to people's opinion of my theme. I took photos of some women with the mannequin, and presented them with a mirror in the studio - hopefully visualising that even though we may feel alone, everyone has this ideal female beauty to compete with. Holding the tiny waist of the body, these women behind the mannequin are representing all females exposed to this illusion of a 'perfect' body. The images show just how unrealistic the image that we are told conform to really is. We are not all one size. We can't all fit the mould.

Some of my photographs

I am very interested in performance art now. I am delighted with my recent burst of confidence (recent being over the last 2/3 years) and wish to explore ideas of how I can capture some kind of performance art.

Dove Commercial

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta created works around themes of feminism, gender, violence, life and death. Above is a photograph from her Silueta Series. Medieta also explored place and the concept of belonging in her work. This series features many images of her nude body's sillohette, moulded or imprinted into a natural landscape.

Body Tracks

Conclusion (at this point)

I just wanted to write to a short conclusion to my blog, as it is at this point. I say that, because post-deadline, I will be continuing to use this space to explore these issues further. I am finding it very beneficial storing everything surrounding this matter all together. I am really enjoying writing down my thoughts in a blog. It has such a different feel to just writing in my journal or on scraps of paper when I need to vent!

It's hard to express how much I have learnt over the last 8 weeks. We were set a research project, in which I chose this subject as I have always felt passionate about it, but with no in-depth knowledge or an understanding of the history. Throughout this period of self-study, I have encountered many different writers and theorists, including Judy Chicago, John Berger and Laura Mulvey. I have also discovered so many artists which have inspired me.

I think forming a conclusion in regards to the issues I have been talking about is extremely tricky. I believe that the gender inequality that we see in the media, whether we understand it consciously or not, will be an ongoing problem. I may be wrong, but from my research, I feel that women are exploited even more now, than in previous decades. As I have previously said, this may be caused be the dramatic technological advancements that we have experienced. Women fought for more coverage in popular media, but maybe when they felt empowered, they were still being used. Women still seem to be vulnerable when it comes to how they are represented; something that can most-definitely be traced to our past patriarchal society. We are still portrayed as the stereotypes that are held against us, and there is still the most powerful emphasis on ideal female beauty.

However, I do feel that maybe the continued use of women's bodies, the objectification and gender stereotypes that are portrayed in current mass media, may be used ironically. At this point in time, people are aware of the women's movement. Popular culture knows about feminism and the battle women faced when fighting for equality. Industries are aware of what it means to objectify women, so maybe in contemporary media, women are represented in such ways to be ironic, to play around with past perceptions.

Like I have said, I don't feel there is a definite conclusion to this blog. Women being used for their visual value has been happening for much longer that I had realised, and continues to be more and more apparent, all around us. Fortunately, there are many people, charities, activist groups etc. raising concerns about this issue, as well as a lot of artists who critique it visually. I feel that it is very important for women, men, but even more so, young children, to learn about how media works, how much of it is false and how to safely interpret the thousands of images that surround us and tell us who we should be. That way, hopefully girls will grow detached from the illusion of a beauty ideal, understanding that it is computer generated, near enough impossible, and that advertisments are soley for marketing purposes. They don't care about our health and well-being, as long as we keep purchasing products in our over-consuming region. Children who learn that there isn't such thing as perfection and normalcy, will hopefully be more content within themselves. I think we should be teaching eachother that we don't have to mould ourselves to fit the criteria that is written in the media. I dream of a generation that celebrates the diversity of humanity.

I hope to continue making art surrounding ideas from this blog. I will definitely keep collecting anything that I find interesting here. Hopefully I can build up a large, virtual journal with useful websites, videos, articles etc.

Below are some extra photos from my current art practice

Self

The beginning of my performace art

Experimenting with casting. Latex and plaster mould.
Exploring ideas of how we must measure up and how we cannot all fit the mould

Studio Assessment

These are photographs of some of my studio work, set up for assessment on March 12th.

Installation: The Illusion of Perfection

Installation: Evolution

Photograph series: Manipulating text lifted from the media

Marina Abramovic

I have only very recently realised who Marina Abramovic is. I find her fascinating and her work extremely exciting. She is a performance artist and uses her body as a medium, saying that this is the most effective way of sharing a message. I've learnt that during the 1970's, Marina performed a series of works in which she was exploring passive agression.

'Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful is one example of how, in the early years of performance art, female artists used their own bodies to challenge the institution of art and the notion of beauty.' (Kim, H, 2009). In this performance, Marina critiques demands for female beauty in art and contemporary culture. See video below.

Contemporary Issues

Due to a complex field of analysis about how women are represented, power relations, the gaze and objectification/subjectivity, we now have a much wider understanding of our practices. Also, on a personal note, due to this research project, I now have a much wider understanding of this issue.

The feminism revolution has achieved what was probably thought to be impossible before it began. If it wasn't for the people that fought for gender equality in our society, women today might have still been unable to vote, unable to have a higher education and unable to become successful, recognised artists. I am so grateful that I'm currently studying at Art College, and understand that this opportunity may not have been available to me, if history hadn't played out the way in which it has. I actually feel quite selfish for not having significant knowledge of this subject before.

What I wanted to mention, was the fact that women today are still represented as objects, and that I don't feel that this has changed much since feminism began fighting against this. In fact, with the considerable increase in technology and the advancements of digital imaging, I feel that women could be more exploited than previously.

In our contemporary culture, women are used in advertisements and all other aspects of the mass media, which saturate our society. Capitalism and consumerism have dominated the 'developed world', which has in turn, been overridden by marketing. Ads are everywhere we look; television, magazines, billboards, shop windows, buses etc. Using an 'ideal' in advertisements is inevitable, but using women to sell products is something I think we have grown to accept - with not many people questioning or fighting the issue. This means, that the unhealthy images we are shown, that affect our health and wellbeing, are for the sake of profits. To me, this is extremely messed up.

Women are objectified and turned into products. They don't only sell the product to us; they also sell the woman. They sell her happiness, her success, her status, her beauty. They sell ideas of love and ‘ideal’ sexuality. The media dramatically informs us of what it is to be normal and to be desirable, by showing us an extremely limited range of images and sub-consciously manipulating us to believing it. This false perception of women, can account for some of us, but the majority of us who do not fit the criteria, are left feeling unworthy and undesirable.

Women are also dismembered. Only parts of our bodies are shown in adverts. Again, women are seen as an object, and as I have learnt, become subject to someone else’s gaze. We learn that the most important thing for a woman is her looks. In turn, men learn that the most important thing about a woman is her looks. I am not saying that all men and women think this way, but this is certainly the damaging message that is sold to us through popular media.


I am currently making artwork surrounding this idea. I entitled it 'The Illusion of Perfection', in which I am trying to visualise and critique the issue. I believe that the body image that we are surrounded with is a completely untrue perception of women. Images are retouched and digitally manipulated with software such as Photoshop. An extreme example of this is shown in this Dove advertisement below.

This Dove advertisement, allows viewers to visualise just how false the ideal female beauty is. This sadly represents only one of the thousands of image that saturate popular media.

The ‘perfect’ body image is non-existent in my eyes. If we do fall into the trap of believing it, I don’t think anyone can feel they have achieved it. The constant pursuing of something unachievable causes us to feel ashamed of ourselves and can lead people to hating their bodies. Depression and eating disorders can arise from a lack of self-respect and low self-esteem, which is just what the mass media is forcing us to feel. It purges this illusion to everyone, including the vulnerable minds of children. This may be one of the reasons why there has been a large increase in eating disorders and related mental health conditions over recent decades. In 2005, the National Eating Disorder Association stated that there was ‘Significant increase in incidence of anorexia from 1935 to 1989’. I understand that women have been represented unfairly for a very long time, so I am not saying that this is a new issue, but technology increases and our ever-consuming society certainly has increased our exposure to the media, which is a possible trigger for this epidemic.

Gender and the Gaze

'The gaze, whether institutional or individual, thus helps to establish relationships of power. The act of looking in commonly regarded as awarding more power to the person who is looking than to the person who is the object of the look.'
(Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, Page 111)

From reading chapter 3 of Practices of Looking, I have learnt a great deal about the gaze and how it is used and maybe misused. As the above quote indicates, being the person looking at something, rather than being displayed as object, automatically gives you a sense of power. If a person is used as raw material, solely to be looked and treated for his/her visual value, that person is striped of what makes them who they are and is subjected only in a controlled gaze.
As history of art stands, paintings were usually geared toward the male viewer, and indeed, successful painters were typically men. This may have caused women to be used for their visual value, if valued at all. I feel that having predominately male artists, means the painting or whichever image is being created, will most likely be of interest to him. This equates with the fact that the art audience was also predominantly male, meaning that if art was to be successful, it had to meed the needs of the male viewer. Heterosexual males dominated what was represented through art, without much apparent question, until the waves of feminism. These traditions in art have evolved throughout the mass media of our society, and as the creative industries, including advertising, was also typically male staff, I am now seeing a connection with past occurances and previous representations of women, and the ways in which they are presented to us now.

'Voyeurism is the pleasure one takes in looking whilst not being seen looking.' (Sterken and Cartwright, 2009, Page 134). This is a term that I also came across in Mulvey's essay. She argues that the camera acts as a mechanism for voyeurism in cinema, which again, I feel also can relate to images in the mass-media. Women are powerless in those images, as they are viewed by people she cannot see looking at her. Voyeurism gives a sense of power to the viewer, again, making the woman no more than an obect of visual value.

The Male Gaze

For me to understand why women are portrayed in the media as they are, I have learnt about the male gaze.

 

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist, who currently is professor of Film and Media Studies and Birkbeck, University of London. She is best known for her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' which was published in 1975.  This, as I have learnt, was during a peek of second wave feminism. I have just read her essay, and although it has left me a little confused, I understand the general concepts she was trying to grasp.

'In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle.'
(Mulvey, L. 1975)

Mulvey introduced us to the term 'male gaze'. In her essay, she uses psychoanalysis to explore our fascination with the human form, the pleasure of looking and how women are represented as image vs. men as 'bearer of the look'. Gaze refers to how men look at women, how women look at themselves and how women look at other women. Mulvey references Freud in her essay, mentioning his three essays on sexuality. From this she states how as soon as we pass the mirror stage as a baby (the first time we recognise our reflection as ourselves in that moment, not someone else) we start to develop identification with ourselves and others. We rapidly learn an 'ego ideal'. From this stage, we interpret our surrounding media as taking other people as objects and subjecting them into a curious and controlling gaze.
Scopophillia is a term that Mulvey uses. I needed to look up the definition as I did not recognise this word.
(the obtaining of sexual pleasure by looking at nude bodies, erotic photographs, etc.'
(The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary)

Mulvey talks about two different types of scopophillia. One in which looking itself is a source of pleasure and, in reverse, there is a pleasure in being looked at. I don't believe that everyone is necessarily aware of a sense of pleasure both actively and passively, but I understand what she means. It reminds me of Berger's well known quote 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at', which I have already quoted in this blog. I don't like to criticise what Berger said, as I do feel that some women do enjoy being looked at. Everyone is different, but women should receive the choice of whether or not they feel comfortable being the object of someones gaze. Unfortunately, in our post-patriarchal society, this is not always the case. Mulvey believed that to watch a film, the audience must view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male. I understand she explored this idea within cinema, but I feel the male gaze is moulded to control most other areas of the mass media; television, advertisements, magazines etc.

I do believe that not all gaze is sexual. Gaze can be a comparison of body image, or admiration, whether this is the conscious mind or not. This kind of gaze shapes our self-worth and is how it does the most damage, I feel.