Readers, would be happy to have your thoughts on this, whether on this site or on facebook.
I am proposing to publish a book based on the most popular article in the Daily Fugue, which is Sex, Art and the Inner World: Women Artists Reclaiming their Creative Birthright.
This article has had four times more page views than the next most popular, which is my exclusive interview based article on artists Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie- also a very popular article, and my short article on Tracey Emin, also with many page views.
I am wondering is it because the word Sex is in the title?
And also the word combination Sex, Art? This would be an inaccurate impression in fact, as the artists are making art about them selves, and their self based experience, of their inner world, and in the examples in the article using themselves as the models for their figurative nude studies.
However some of the artists I wrote about do make art about sexuality from a female perspective, their own, for example Del Kathryn Barton and Tracey Emin. It is part of life, and the life of the inner world, that women have discussed openly in public forums and in art and writing since the women's art movement of the 1970s. It is a sign of health in a culture and society that women can do this openly, and that it is taken seriously. So that is a good reason to publish in this area.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
Meanwhile working title of the proposed publication is "Mothers, Art and the Inner World: Women Artists Reclaiming their Creative Birthright". This will cover contemporary women artists, mothers and non mothers, whose focus is on identity, subjectivity and the self.
All the best,
Ruth
Showing posts with label Women Artists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Women Artists. Show all posts
Wednesday 24 July 2013
Tuesday 23 April 2013
Art for Peace in the "War Against Women"
Visual images of women and girls can be used
to subjugate, oppress, and exploit women (through advertising and commodification
in consumer capitalism) yet images also document and report the violence; and
images that women artists and activists make themselves have the symbolic power
to counter and create new levels of acceptance and understanding and liberation
of women from tyranny of oppression and violence by agents of death- around the
world.
Women contemporary artists around the world
are working in the genre of self portraiture, and the politics of the personal, and
the effect of the images they create can counteract the objectified
representations of women, in what is still largely an “unconscious” subliminal
symbolic ‘war against women’ played out through images and visual
representation. Illustrating this post is an image from Australian artist Diane Mantzaris, whose work is also
discussed here, in the context of contemporary media iconography and social
media and its impacts on changing attitudes to women, in local and global media
activism.
Diane Mantzaris
‘Garden of Eve: the Ages of Inhumanity’ 2012
206cm (Height) x 120cm (Width)
C-Type Photograph
|
This week social media is filled with
images and stories of women (and men) who are fighting against violation, and
standing up for women’s and girls rights around the world; and stories of women
who are being violated by oppressive systems calling to support the women. On
this site, this week was published a popular article, in counter-balance against
oppression, the story, on this blog, of a trend of women artists, and
specifically Australian women contemporary artists who are bravely and proudly
using their own bodies in self portraiture, effectively as a powerful means of trying
to symbolically change the visual language which has oppressed women – often unconsciously
and subliminally through the mainstream and advertising “consumer” media. This
has received a tremendously positive response with thousands of page views, and
comments of support from around the world on facebook- and some of the
responses are documented here.
Social media news this week is full of
appalling stories, and graphic images, of violence against women and girls
around the world. The horrors women face are shown in
graphic images, which are often linked to causes to support through internet petition.
From Turkey death threats against Amina, a 19 year old woman who posted an
image of herself bare breasted with the words of protest written on her skin.
Stories and images of routine female genital
mutilation from Africa, a 2000-year long cultural practice that is carrying
over into England, a gruesome image of a removed cliterectomy, and story that
change is coming by increasing the knowledge of women who perform the
mutilations, and their awareness of the trauma and physical and mental harm
this causes women and girls (so that rather than being supposedly good for them
according to tradition it is in fact very bad for them)- so that they make the
changes themselves, to drop the practice.
And in the Maldives, the horrific case of
the 15 year old raped by her step-father, who gave birth to his child which was
murdered by him, and then she was sentenced to 100 lashes in public- with
photographs showing this atrocity. This is the most appalling case of blaming
and further punishing the victim for their traumatic assault. This has led to
calls around the world to boycott Maldives tourism industry, and this has begun
in force, with almost 1 and a half millions signatures to an online petition to
end public flogging and change the law in the Maldives to better protect
victims of rape and sexual abuse.
These are but three cases in the endless
number of stories of ongoing violence in what is known as the war against
women.
In all of these cases, and as it has been
for thousands of years, in the war on women, it is the centre of the women’s
fertility, reproductive systems, and inner world that is the target of attacks,
violating women’s bodies, by invasion – just as separately ‘mother earth’ has
been, and is still, violated by the invasions of rape by excessive and damaging
industrialization and destruction of the environment for profit for a few.
This manifests as dissociation, separation
of body and self, of women’s images as objective “representation” – which is
also used as a form of attempted colonizing of women’s bodies, and selves – for
profit, for instance by advertisers and porn industry. It can lead to traumatic
dissociation by those who are subjected to it as a form of internal escape of
the trauma. Contemporary medical researchers and psychologists (perhaps
surprisingly) admit to very little understanding of ‘dissociation’ and
dissociative disorders -of which the dissociative fugue a temporary form of amnesia
of self identity is one- yet these are prevalent in contemporary media society that
surrounds us: which in itself manifests as dissociative. Social media may help
to counteract that by enabling people to express themselves, not as passive
recipients, but as active contributors and agents of change.
Now it is time to reclaim what has been
repressed: our sexuality, subjectivity our inner world, our fertility our
reproductive systems, that are violated by the atrocities we know from the news
reports in local global social media. And sadly for so many from personal
experiences of traumatic attacks on the self. And at the same time to change
and reverse the violations against ‘mother nature’, and show respect and love
for what sustains us: our environment, and our mothers. We need to reverse the
horrors and appreciate the integrity and strength of the bodies of women and
girls- and men and boys, who are also violated in the rape of wars.
That is why the works of the women artists
pioneering self-portraiture that counteracts the negativity directed against
women through self-based visual symbolism are so important.
As part of the war against women, is the
subliminal effect of the violations and repressions that many women and girls
around the world, and in the western world internalize. This affects
particularly perhaps middle class women in conformist and appearance-based media
cultures, who are perpetually worried that there is something “wrong” with their
physical appearance, and feel an excessive compulsion to diet or self harm
their bodies. Such anxieties and self- doubt also boost the massive cosmetic
industries- and as we know amongst biggest growth areas for cosmetic procedures
are from western women to modify their own vaginas, as they are fearful and
anxious about their own natural shape.
Breast operations, and breast enhancement is another boom area of
cosmetic surgery which is fed by women’s anxieties - and also in some cases
their own exploitation of their bodies to make money or attract potential
suitors, wealthy husbands, which comes from internalization of the values of
women’s bodies as commodities- which saturates visual media culture.
Countering this. The therapeutic effect of
women making art from their bodies, to express their feelings, and to make political statements, is very
powerful. This was pointed out by facebook comments by a counselor, Anni from
Finland in discussion on the images by feminist artist Diane Mantzaris, in the
article posted on the Daily Fugue this week.
Diane Mantzaris shared her own experiences
of censorship and hate mail that has been sent to her that included threats,
which she compared to the threats against Amina in Turkey. Social counselor Anni Paananen, from Finland, wrote of the enormous
good that positive self based imagery of women’s bodies by them selves, does
for women and girls. And she focused on this particular powerful goddess like
portraits by Diane.
“I'm a child of the 70’s and would probably not know a lot about
the issues of the women's movement back then if it wasn't for the fact that we
still encounter the same ignorance - not just from men, but unfortunately also
from each other. I've had more than one girl crying in my office because she's
been called 'c***' (which in Swedish and Finnish is expressed with even more
negative emphasis than in English) and for me to be able to turn that
argument/reasoning totally around with something familiar also to their mothers
- and through ART! - is of great value. I'm happy there are women like Diane
today - REAL women - whose actions will have constructive and liberating
consequences for more than just one or two generations.”
She continued:
“When I encountered the art of Diane Mantzaris I was thrilled. Of course she is
provoking! - there she is, this goddess, and at first You aren't sure she's
even real, if her Eve is a photo or a painting, but two things are clear: she's
enjoying her own sexuality and You would never let your husband or spouse
anywhere near her. Of course it's not in Your interest to dwell upon her
sexuality, it scares You to the point where You feel the need to ignore it, but
honestly... are You able to? THEN all of a sudden this notion: WHY do I feel
threatened? Is it because I'm not like her? Why am I not like her? Would I want
to be? And since I'm not? - is it WRONG to be like her? Is it wrong to enjoy my
own sexuality as a woman, and to let other women enjoy theirs? And what is even
worse: to display oneself on a scene that is not the porn industry! And if it's
not wrong, then why is it so difficult? Then on the other hand, maybe to some
individuals it really is uninteresting. Then my question would be: if You for
some reason all of a sudden were totally prohibited to enjoy sex or even have
sex, would You also then be uninterested in the sexuality of others?
I'm a councellor. The young girls I've talked to who cut
themselves and starve themselves to punish themselves for being too little this
or too much that are numerous. Some of their mothers do it too. We are still
not proud to be women, and still far from enjoying our own sexuality and our
own bodies. Women still meet ignorance from men, and what is worse - we meet
ignorance from each other. I wish we could turn it around! - like Diane tries
to do within the artscene: reclaim her own - and our! - given birthright
In the war against women, the struggle may
be won through changing the “symbolic order” to adapt a term used by psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, describing language and its effect in constructing the social
world of culture that we live in and internalize. How to do this literally and
symbolically is by women themselves changing the way women’s images are
visually manifested in cultural form, through embodiment of self-expression,
and through making interventions in the language of art, and the media. By
women taking control, and standing up for themselves, and by the oppressed
(women and men) supporting each other.
Resisting oppression of women and girls,
and fighting repression of women’s bodies and selves, sexuality and
subjectivity, and control of reproductive systems, are issues and a struggle
that women around the world, and men who support humanity, can unite on and
oppose the agents of death. That way we can make change and create a better
world for us all to live in together. Thank you again and kudos to those brave
women artists and activists around the world who are doing that now and leading
the way forward to change.
Ruth Skilbeck 28.3.2013
Writing Girl-Machine: the inner journey is hard.
By Ruth Skilbeck
In effect it’s a way of literally and
symbolically “occupying” the bodies of women that have been represented as
‘objects of desire’ by male artists throughout art history, as projections of
male artists’ perceptions and devoid of female subjectivity. Women artists are reclaiming female bodies,
as their own subjects, and part of this is reflection and interrogation of the
issues to do with “the gaze” – such as this article.
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 in personal intimate relations
between people. 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 and reproduced 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,
and young women experience and live in society.
This is in contrast to the myth of the
independent woman as “cold, inaccessible, and free” which was the way in which
artist Tamara de Lempicka was described by her daughter, Kizette, in her self portrait (Autoportait in the Green Bugatti, 1925) in the “machine
age”, of the 1920s, driving her car: "The
self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman
who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a
cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this
woman is free! “This is also a myth I seek to explore, and
puncture, in Girl-Machine, in London in the media consumer culture of 1980s when:
“The ultimate kick is to remain completely impervious, to feel nothing, as the
other person falls utterly in love with your; as remote, uncaring and
invulnerable as a machine.” (Girl-Machine).
Saturday 16 March 2013
Writing
the inner journey is hard
It’s
hard to remain or keep trying to remain conscious, and to be aware of how one
feels, and try to have some understanding of where this is coming from.
It’s
hard, and I am having a lot of difficulty over the past two or three days with
barriers that have come up in my writing, of my inner censor, and I admit it is
fear, that is causing some apprehension of the reception of my work if I publish
writing on sexuality, and consciousness and subjectivity. This happened before
when the Breakfast with Monica story was published. I was so apprehensive of the
reception it did not make me feel good that it was published but instead
extremely anxious (even though it had a nom de plume. That was when my marriage
was ending). And even though I was writing about sexuality from a woman’s
perspective that grounded the sexual act in human reflection.
Even
though this was my aim and intention in writing this book (Girl –Machine) now I
am doing it, and writing it, I am being overcome by the same anxiety and fear.
And
this is despite the good conversations on Facebook that have been triggered by
my article on women artists censorship and the comments of how much we need to
have women artists and mother artists making art about these very things that I
am tackling in my book- female sexuality, bodies, consciousness, subjectivity
and how women cope in the world we live in, I am doing all that and have had
such positive response that shows this is so needed – because not many are
doing this especially in Australia where art is censored silently (and self-censored).
This
should make me feel like I am doing well that I am able to write about it in my
book in progress. But instead I have been paralysed by inner doubts- even to
the degree of today hours of agonizing over what would my ancestors (from the
18th century!) have thought about my writing about sexuality? And
seriously worrying about what their ghosts and ancestor-spirits would think and
are thinking now about my writing the novel Girl Machine? (As there is now some
small reference I made to them in the Dublin section). And instead thinking
that I should write a “proper” book, novel - historical interweaving about them
and my search to find my lost ancestry which I have now, and not bother with
the little novel first person novels I have been “working on” for so long in my
“inner writing” and my novels that never get published, as I have not even
tried to publish them.
This
whole rumination fear stopped me in my tracks yesterday, which was the day that
I had planned to finish the novel and send it to the publisher.
It is
now after 5 in the morning and I have been awake all night.
The
thing that made me feel a little better was reading an article that my friend
Karen linked to on her blog that I saw in blog feed about kundalini bad sex
experience written by a woman who writes about and lives the SM B and D
lifestyle. Not that my book is about this- but what she was writing about the
experiences of inner consciousness in the body was very interesting and human
and made me feel more human.
This
shows me, must show me that this is the value of my writing that I have been
trying to do, too.
It is
the difficult hard things that trouble us, that are those that we or I must
tackle as by doing so what I write may have value and meaning for others, that
may help them to feel more human too. Writing about sexuality with human
awareness and reflection, has this power, and it is so much needed as sexuality
women’s sexuality has been hijacked for the centuries of modern life, and not
just women’s in objectifying men are also losing out on their chance to
experience deeper meaning within them selves, and …..
on it
goes.
When
I research my ancestors what I see is that they loved each other, they had
fulfilling happy lives as they loved each other and were loyal to each other.
And I
think that in my life the modern lives in modernity we have lost that.
They
had better lives then.
I
know I am being negative, I am negative I can only write this and I am trying to
do what? Not trying to work through it I am just off loading some negativity.
Because it’s another dark night of the soul and I am alone in the cottage in
the middle of the night with a head that is ringing with pressure and pain.
3/23/13 5:39 AM
A few late nights later, I am very excited
to find in my internet research images of both Andrew Hastings Doyle and Sophia
Isabella Doyle (nee Norris) - my x 7 great
grandfather and grandmother (political exiles, Andrew was exiled to Australia
for life for his part in the Irish Uprisings around 1798, Sophia Isabella who
was of Hugenot descent and, according to one story I have read related to Irish aristocracy, went with him and with their 3 young children, as a free settler
and fee paying passenger). There is a photograph of Andrew that must be one of
the earliest taken in Australia in the early 19th century, and a
portrait he painted of Sophia Isabella, he was an artist and printmaker, by
profession.
I will publish these images in the Daily Fugue
soon, writing on their story, in the further ongoing unfolding of my story of
finding my motherline.
Images:
Andromeda (also known as The Slave) by Tamara de Lempicka.
Andromeda was a popular subject of 19th
century painting, represented by male artists. In the classical Greek myth
Andromeda was chained to a rock on the coastline as a sacrifice to a sea
monster sent by Poseidon to avenge her mother’s hubris in declaring her
daughter to be more beautiful than the sea nymphs.
Tamara de Lempicka was a refugee, exile
from the Russian revolution, and in her later works she also painted refugees
of the German Holocaust.
*Refugee: Slaves of State by Diane
Mantzaris
The work has visual references to the Andromeda
myth and its representations- by Tamara de Lempicka in her Andromeda (also known as The Slave) - and is a feminist, politically aware counterpoint to the 19th century male artists' representations of the myth of Andromeda, a popular subject of 19th painting represented by male artists.
Diane Mantzaris has an émigré background.
Diane Mantzaris has an émigré background.
de Lempicak-Foxhall, Baroness Kizette
(1987), Phillips Charles, ed., Passion by
Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka, New York: Abbeville Press,
p. 77
Friday 8 March 2013
A Homage to (Censored) Women Artists on International Women's Day
By Ruth Skilbeck
Today we can take
a moment to reflect on the ongoing struggle of women and girls for the rights
of women to equality of cultural participation and dignity of being, in all
aspects of social life. The struggle to value domestic and carer’s labour the “traditional
unpaid realm of women’s work”. The struggle to value the worth and being, of
mothers, even –and especially- if they are not in traditional marriages. The struggle
against violence against women on all levels. This begins in the
home-every home.
Happy International Women’s Day to all who support women’s and girl’s struggle against oppression around the world- and who appreciate what women give the world.
Happy International Women’s Day to all who support women’s and girl’s struggle against oppression around the world- and who appreciate what women give the world.
In appreciation of
the great struggle over the past fifty years for women to participate fully in
the public cultural realm as artists, and make art from their own personal
experiences and perceptions of the world.
Ruth Skilbeck, Matrix of Creation, 2013 |
Women artists, of
all women, are those who most visibly represent, express, and champion the rights
of women to participate as equals in what, until the 1970s, was still a male
dominated public realm of visual and intellectual culture.
Through the
history of modernity, women have struggled against oppression to enter the
cultural realm as artists- instead of in the roles allotted them in the history
of male-dominated western art- as models, muses, wives, mistresses, mothers,
and all-round life support systems.
Since the 1970s,
in increasing numbers, women have asserted that right and entered the public
realm of arts and culture as artists in their own right. Women’s
representations of women, of themselves, and of their subjects, are made
through women’s subjectivity, and there is naturally – and culturally- a very
large qualitative difference. That is seen in the images that are made of women- by women
artists. Rather than being represented as object of desire, women artists are subjects
of their own desiring gaze. Looking at an image of a woman by a woman, a self portrait, - or a non-representational
conceptual work- gives a real insight not only into what it looks like, appearance, but beyond appearance and representation – into female subjectivity and nowhere perhaps is this shown more intensively
than in women’s self portraits of their bodies, and of maternal
subjectivities. The Madonna and child is
an image that has appeared like a recurring motif throughout art history, from
biblical times, through the renaissance to now. In the hands of women artists,
and mother artists this takes on a power of self-expression that matches the
most esteemed works of the expressionists and old masters.
However, at around
the same time that women started to enter the art schools in equal numbers, it
seems that a new taboo and wave of censorship sprang up- a censoring aimed at
the body. Life drawing has suffered and what has been the target in Australia:
mother artists’ representations of their bodies, and of children. Although male
artists have represented women, girls, mothers and children and naked
frolicking cherubs for centuries, with imaginative and often licentious
abandon, no sooner did women start to seriously paint and display images of
children and themselves, than the "art police" started stepping in and closing down
shows. And I do not mean this metaphorically. Several exhibitions of women artists’
works showing female subjects- of subjectivity, artists self-portraits, in
pregnancy, and of their own children – have been visited and closed down by the
police, in recent years in Australia. In other cases, individual art works have been censored.
This has happened recently,
and over the past ten years, to numerous prominent and award winning Australian
contemporary women artists, Cherry Hood (winner of the Archibald Prize, 2002) –
for portraits of children. Del Kathryn Barton (winner of the Archibald Prize
2008), for a portrait of her own son, and separately for Ella Dreyfuss for sensitive
photography of pregnant women. Diane Mantzaris for self- portraiture… to name a
few recent cases. All these artists continue to work, and exhibit their works,
and without them, it hardly needs to be said, Australian culture would be a lot
less vital and interesting.
It is shameful that it is women artists, and
specifically it seems mother artists who should be covertly targeted and
intimidated in this way. It is like a kind of secret bullying. But it does not
stop them making their work. This is an occupational hazard of being a mother
artist, and a woman artist, in Australia today making figurative work. However,
despite the preoccupation with “OH and S” (Occupational Health and Safety) in
the Australian workplace, it seems that so far this hazard has gone unacknowledged-
at least officially. There should be
public warnings in art schools, and advice for female students on how to deal
with the harassment they may encounter if they pursue a career as a figurative
artist. Instead it is still little talked about.
So let us start to
talk about it and appreciate our women artists!
Today let us
celebrate International Women’s Day by paying homage to all the brave and
expressive women artists around the world, who illuminate how it feels to be a
woman, expressing the inner world and outer reality of women as subjects not
objects of the male gaze. They give
women and girls’ strength and confidence in being female, and able to follow
their creative paths as artists. They
give men a chance of empathizing, knowing and understanding how women feel, and
see the world as artists; as women have done for men for centuries. They make
our world a better place to live in.
-
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