By Ruth Skilbeck
I wrote this a few days ago, before the
piece on Sex, Art and the Inner World, and am publishing it now here as part of
the documentation of writing of the inner world, subjectivity and desire and
the social, which I am doing in my novel in progress, Girl-Machine. After I
wrote these notes (quoted below), I read the article on changing attitudes to
women’s sexuality through history, which was very relevant to my thoughts
recorded here, about my ancestors, and anxieties also documented here were
somewhat allayed. The experience of doing this writing, about the inner world
and experiences of the self, in social contexts, has increased my awareness of
how hard this can be emotionally. It increased my deep appreciation of the
women artists working in all media, who create self-based art, that presents
‘naked’ reflections of themselves, honestly explores sexuality, sexual selves,
and their subjectivity, as personal experience and art reflection, as
political and social, and their bravery in raising our level of consciousness
on the social level through their doing so.
The power and value of this is that it
counters the dissociation of contemporary society, and modernity which is
literally and symbolically manifest in the mass media, and our largely
unconscious ingestion of images, of representations of women as sexualized
objects in advertising, mass media, and porn, that are dissociated from the
people who are represented and the people who make the images- to make profit
in capitalist consumer media society. The effects and affects of this
dissociation is manifest and articulated by countless individuals around the
world in symptoms of internalized anxiety and phobias about their own bodies,
selves, and relations with others, creating barriers to real communication and
meaningful relationships, in the cultures of neo-liberalism and consumer
capitalism which create casualization in the workplace and also in personal intimate
relations between people (eg the phenomena and terminology of "casual sex"). These are connected, through the unconscious feelings
we have about ourselves, and our own self confidence and values about what is
meaningful in life, appearance – and certain kinds of objectified “approved”
appearance- has far too much “value” attached in the media cultures that are
sponsored and fed and manipulated by advertising and vested profit interests in
the products and ideologies re-presented in media cultures.
Through women artists reclaiming the right
to self-representation, and doing this, they reposition the personal as
political, and representations of desire as social, and their art counters the commodification
and objectification of women that oppresses and subjugates women (and men)
around the world. The processes of engaging with these artists and their works,
and the wider social issues of the importance of women documenting and
recording their own experiences, as personal reflection and art, for the
purposes of raising awareness of consciousness of humanity and countering the
agents of oppression of women, has also strengthened my faith in what I am
doing in my writing, and its legitimacy, and driven away the temporary anxieties
of creating this new work.
Together we can create change, through
mutual support and building community strength.
So I am continuing to write Girl-Machine,
and it is almost finished. I am
publishing these notes from the moment of doubt to show that it is ok to have
moments of doubt, it is part of the process of creating, and all artists have
to face and find ways of dealing with this. My way here, is to make public as
part of the process of writing, the notes and anxieties that are usually left
out of public view, and excluded, so that the art work arrives as finished
product, a fait accompli dissociated from the labour, sweat, pain and human
toil of the process that created it and gave it birth.
I believe that part of the social and
personal value of art is the connection it enables both audience and artists to
the source of our humanity, what makes us human, our deepest selves, and our
feelings, through communication- on a real level. So as part of this, I am
sharing some of the inner journey of the process of making a work of self-based
art from written language, concepts, memories, desire, and reflection on how women experience and live in society.
Saturday March
No comments:
Post a Comment