There are seven weeks to go until the opening of the collaborative exhibition at the ArtSpace Gallery in Durban: 20 November 2012. 49 days until my art piece will be unveiled and along with it myself, exposed…to gazes, scrutiny, judgement, critique. But as an artist this is what you live and die for, and this is a huuuge opportunity to get my work out there, and my name, as well as certainly taking a big step toward my dream of becoming a fulltime artist. Granted the work I am presenting is obviously aimed toward my degree requirements for this year, and as such is very experimental and not the type of thing I would normally choose to do. But it has taken me way out of my comfort zone and will test and try me in ways that I have not been before and this is good. I will also most certainly grow as a person and an artist: the process is as important as the completed artwork. People tend to forget that: the process is as important as the completed artwork!
As I have mentioned in previous posts of mine, as well as listed under my influences, my particular area of study has been feminist performance artists of the 60s and 70s: in particular, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta and Mary Beth Edelson. The sad fact is that most of you will be asking yourself, “who?” Three years ago I would have been doing the same thing .You know of Picasso, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, even perhaps (I say hopefully), Frida Kahlo, maybe Georgia O’ Keefe? But these warrior-artists, I’m guessing not. Why do I call them warrior-artists? Well, it is a really complex question because it not only deals with art but also our society and culture (another important concept: art does not exist in a vacuum but reflects, is coloured and is a response to a myriad of stimuli and influences). Western Art, for the last few thousand years, to a large extent, reflects the patriarchal nature of our society: in other words, a male-dominant society, originally driven by Abrahamism (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which has determined and dictated how we behave, see and think. A fine example of such a reflection is the Neoclassical painter, Frenchman Jacques Louis David (1748-1825). Just to place him in history for you, he was prominent during the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rule. In his paintings David treated his subjects according to their gender. The masculine were depicted as muscular, strong, powerful and hard, rigorously striving. The colours he used were polychromatic, vivid and bright. The feminine, however, were limp, weak, powerless and soft, languid and without will or character. In contrast the colours he used were monochrome, muted and dull.
Two fine examples of this are his works, Oath of the Horatii (1784) and The Lictus Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789), see below. You will notice, however, that I have disrupted his work, ruptured it, by inserting the image of Carolee Schneemann from her performance art piece, Interior Scroll (1975), into them. In a similar fashion this is what Schneemann and the other feminist performance artists did. The female body, now depicted by a woman became a weapon against the patriarchal constructs of gender, and so is reclaimed for women by them. However, body art by its very nature attempts to draw the spectator into the work rather than distancing them, and so by doing this also asks questions of the viewer, causing ruptures in mindsets and social constructs. It is the colonizing male gaze that these artists sought to disrupt where the female is depicted as the seducer: an object, to engage with and to perform for the male, who is the seduced, yet detached viewer.
To gaze is to look; to look steadily and intently, as with great interest or wonder: my gaze; is white, European, African male. I colonize space with it, an insertion as well as an assertion of my presence, and my reaction and interpretation to encountered and experienced stimuli as a result of this, and then my presentation of these experiences. There is a duality to my reaction and interpretation: one is of a primal nature, the other more cerebral, of the intellect. In one I am a male looking at a naked female, she is a body, an object, and I wish to possess her, while the other is one of awe for this great human. I am filled with great respect and admiration for her, her courage and accomplishments, subject with an identity rather than an object. Logically it is a point-of-view coloured and biased by the “eye”, me.
The issues above are what my artwork will attempt to address, in the form of performance piece, installation and documentation. I will provide more details of the actual piece in a later post, but for now I would like to introduce you to the subjects of my piece:
Carolee Schneemann: embraced her femininity and sexuality. In a menstrual dream, she dreamt of piercing a man’s leg with the tip of a red umbrella. For a woman it is quite natural to bleed and in fact, regenerative, while a man can only bleed when subjected to trauma. The dream led her to her work: Fresh Blood – A Dream Morphology. Menstrual dreams have an extra vividity, the power of her insight as result of the body’s increased sensitivity of her menstruating body. She imagined her lover’s penis as a paintbrush stirring her blood as primeria material in a dramatic fluid exchange. Red drench to white ejaculate.
“I made a gift of my body to other women; giving our bodies back to ourselves.”
By December, 1963, Schneemann had already established her body as visual territory with Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions; by going public with her body she deprivatized it. Interior Scroll reclaimed the female body from the patriarchal eye and its gaze through, ironically, this deprivatisation of herself. At the For Women Here and Now festival she placed a long table under dimmed spotlights in a corner of the hall. Her audience was largely composed of other women artists. Schneeman approached the table carrying in two sheets. She then undressed, wrapped herself in one and spread the other over the table. She told the audience that she would read from, Cezanne, She was a Great Painter. Then, dropping the sheet, she painted large strokes defining the features of her exposed face and body. She climbed onto the table, reading out aloud with the book in one hand, while taking a series of life model poses. Schneemann then dropped the book and stood upright on the table and began extracting a scroll from her vagina. As she did this, inch by inch, she read from it.
Hannah Wilke: was often accused of flaunting her model-looks and body in her body art work, “people give me the bullshit of ‘what would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous?’ What difference does it make? Everybody dies”. Ironically it was in her death that she answered her critics with her Intra-Venus project which was exhibited post mortem. She documented her struggle with and eventual death from lymphoma cancer. She began her career by utilising vaginal imagery creating sculptural forms, and then in her Starification Object Series in 1974 she used her naked body as a backdrop for these vulvas. For her medium she used chewing gum saying, “it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman, chew her up, get what you want out of her and pop in a new piece”. Each of these “vulvas” stuck to her naked body was a scar.
Marina Abramovic: “I saw that all cultures pushed the body to the physical extreme in order to make a mental jump, to eliminate the fear of death, the fear of pain and of all the body limitations with which we live.” Marina Abramovic disintegrates herself and thus her mind is removed from the reality of her body. The body is penetrated or punished to feel or encounter the self, mental absence from the body as a result of pain. In her piece, Lips of Thomas (1975), she ate a kilo of honey, drank a litre of red wine and then broke the wine glass with her hand. She whipped herself, and lay on a cross constructed of blocks of ice with a heater suspended over her. She also cut a large five-pointed star on her belly with a razor blade. These rituals pointedly indicated a marked body, a visible wound and the destruction of her identity and in turn resulted in the elevation of her mind from her body. With pain Abramovic destroyed the image of feminine narcissim as well as the role of women as passive objects.
Ana Mendieta: “I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body based on my own silhouette… I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb of nature. My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” Mendieta’s early works are primordial rites of blood sacrifice in celebration of Mother Earth, invoking her power, while she is consumed and taken into the womb of the Earth by the Goddess in her Siluetas. She makes herself and her body autonomous by turning herself into a silhouette or earth trace. The masculine colonizing gaze is thwarted by ritualizing as well as removing the actual female body.
Mary Beth Edelson: has frequently employed a variety of figures such as the femme fatale, the trickster, movie stars, and the mythological goddesses, Baubo and Sheela-na-gig in her work since the early 1970s. This is a moment when feminists sought out sources of power and spirituality that reflected not only an alternative to Western patriarchal religious structures but also spiritual histories in which women held significant positions and power. Diverse as these female types appear, they are connected through humour. As Edelson states: “Humour is a mode of speech that is indirect and ambiguous, and therefore, can have multiple interpretations. It can potentially disrupt dominant meanings and the social order while protecting the joker from consequences that might occur if the same message were delivered in a serious mode. Humour sabotages critics, for unlike spoken language, laughter does not belong to a linguistic code and, therefore, has the possibility of creatively breaking that mold while taking advantage of humour’s natural attraction.”
I am hoping you will be inspired by this post, and go and do some research on these artists, and talk about them. People should know about them, they deserve our acknowledgement and respect, as well as our appreciation of their work as art, these warrior-artists.