'Men look, women are looked at, ' said John Berger in his seminal 1972 documentary series Ways of Discovering, and in that one word, Berger summarised the partnership between men and women, and the objectification of women by men. From Susannah being viewed by the Elders, to Manet's Luncheon on the Turf, women in skill have been continually portrayed as not only objects of desire, but things to be owned or operated.
One might like to think that feminism, and women, have come quite a distance, not only from the bra-burning days and nights of the '60s and '70s, and the power-suited days and nights of the '80's, that found women in positions of electricity in the town, and in politics; even from the times of early suffrage. Yet one has only to look at a daily publication, a woman's journal, a Hollywood movie, let alone a man's publication, to realize that the objectification of women is as rampant (and I take advantage of that word deliberately) as it has ever before been. Even in the world of 'High Artwork', paintings such as Lucien Freud's of a pregnant Kate Moss still portray girl as something that can be viewed, desired, possessed.
One would most definitely like to feel that women attended a long way since Rousseau explained, in typically succinct fashion, that 'the doll is the peculiar enjoyment of the females; from whence we see their taste plainly adapted with their destination. ' One presumes Rousseau was discussing baby dolls, little girl dolls, to be played with and decked out in pretty clothes, to be seated quietly, prettily and well dressed in a area, unobejcting and unobjectionable, good practise not limited to motherhood but womanhood; but he could just as well have been discussing that most modern-day of dolls, the Barbie - curvaceous, well dressed and fairly, with a clothing of clothes that would enable her to follow any job, from astronaut to veterinary, captivating but sexless, epitomised by the newest addition to the sisterhood, Burqa Barbie, so that all girls feel represented in a globalised 21st century. All girls that are curvaceous and well outfitted, rather and sexless and calm, anyway.
Mary Wollstonecraft, the mom of Western feminism, assumed that so long as men saw women as trophy wives, and had taken mistresses, that the oppression of women should continue, yet she didn't only blame men, thinking also that women were complicit in their own objectification, and discussing them as clay figures to be moulded by men. Young ladies, Wollstonecraft assumed, were enslaved to men through their communal training. Together with the arriving of post-feminism, one could hope that ladies had finally broken this male-oriented patriarchal conception of them, but it appears in truth to be the opposite. Young women expose more and more of themselves, stating that they are in control, plus they may show all the flesh as they wish in this post-feminist world, but one cannot help but feel that Wollstonecraft was right - women still bottom their worth on how much a guy values them, and on important little else. Barbie may be a 21st century astronaut, but unless she actually is busty and beautiful, Ken will not be interested, and Barbie will be worthless, both in her own eyes and the ones of culture.
In this essay, I propose to explore how feminism and post feminism have affected my development as an musician, and to question the way the media's continued portrayal of women as a commodity has afflicted other contemporary musicians and artists, both positively and adversely.
'The goal of feminism, ' said an early spokeswoman, 'was to improve the nature of artwork itself, to enhance culture in sweeping and long lasting ways by launching into it the heretofore suppressed point of view of women. '
Barbie as symbolic of female as object are available not only in modern day art, but also in modern day literature; she's moved into day-to-day speech as a contemptuous comment on gorgeous women ('She's only a Barbie doll!' is a derisive criticism aimed at a woman perceived to be beautiful but dumb, ironic when one considers how it is specifically this image that is being sold to us by the press!) Mattel may market Barbie as a modern career girl, far more independent than the initial 1950s clothes equine, but is she as complicit in the objectification of modern women as Mary Wollstonecraft explained over 200 years ago?
The London based mostly shooter Alex Kliszynski would appear to trust Wollstonecraft, and has directly questioned such attitudes in a body of work that combines the imagery of pornography with Barbie dolls.
(http://areyoushaved. net/2009/10/art-culture-nude-human-barbie-dolls/)
The instant reaction of the spectator is one of revulsion, a feeling that something is not right. Such an extremely sexualised child's toy is obscene, but maybe that is the expected point of the artwork? Barbie is the best commodified, sexist, male-fantasy view of what women should appear to be. She has a tiny waist, long hip and legs, and enormous chest. However, oddly, if you think about it, this highly sexualized body actually lacks erotic parts, or the areas of the body we would find out if she were totally nude. She has no vagina. Her breasts haven't any nipples. In addition, Action Man, an idealized, sexualized male specimen, has no penis no scrotum. By putting a sexless doll in a lascivious and crude position which should show all the intimate organs but doesn't, Kliszynski is making a touch upon the dehumanising of women (and men) by press led objectification; it is his motive to call attention to that disconnection, to help make the viewers aware of the sexualized images of women and men that Barbie and Action Man dolls trade in.
However, I believe there is certainly another, yet more sinister, way of reading Kliszynski's art work. The dolls are a monstrous mixture of human and plastic; even the title of the task is 'Individual Barbie Dolls', suggesting an abnormal combination of the two. You'll be able to understand Kliszynski's part as a touch upon the present day phenomena of body dysmorphia, a disorder that triggers a person to trust there is something terribly incorrect with an element of the face or body, and which frequently leads them into a series of plastic surgeries. Kliszynski's individual Barbies symbolise this body dysmorphic tendency common in so a lot of (western) population, this desire to turn the body into a work of art, a perfection of flesh and vinyl to match the abnormal understanding of idealised beauty prompted by the media.
In her poem, Barbie Doll, Marge Piercy makes quite similar point:
This girlchild was created as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and small GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the colour of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose area and fat lower limbs.
She was healthy, examined intelligent,
possessed strong hands and back again,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone noticed a fat nose area on thick feet.
She was recommended to learn coy,
exhorted to seriously hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a admirer belt.
So she take off her nasal area and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket shown on satin she lay
with the undertaker's makeup products coated on,
a turned-up putty nasal,
dressed in a white and pink nightie.
Doesn't she look quite? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy stopping.
Both Kliszynski and Piercy have recognised the detrimental effect on the mental and physical health of women (and men) of society's objectification of the body. By constantly portraying an idealised myth of not just the body but the very role of women in society, the media (and sections of the art work world) have created a culture which views your body in it's natural real human state as somehow wrong and unusual.
Equally, both Kliszynski and Piercy have recognized the complicity of women in this culture; the girl in the poem is healthy and clever, born 'as common', presumably 'normal' in all respects, and yet she accepts the truth of her low value in contemporary society because she is not perceived as bodily perfect. Only in fatality, with her nostril cut off and a cosmetically improved 'putty' nose set up instead, can she be seen as 'very'. Her value as a solid and useful person in world is non-existent in a global that refuses to see past her face.
Kliszynski himself has said that 'the main body of my work is lots of human-dolls that try to raise questions about the many images of the objectified and idealised body that people see in the mass marketingI arrived to make this work as a reaction to the lowest-common-denominator method of masculinity taken by the multimedia which will serve and perpetuates the 'lad' or 'raunch' elements of our culture. Curiously this 'lad/raunch' culture seems also to be embraced by many young women; a sensation which seems contrary to a properly progressive understanding of gender and personality in a post-feminist era. ' (http://lostinasupermarket. com/2010/09/barbie-porn-seriously/)
'Lad newspapers' such as Maxim, Stuff and various other UK-based journals intended for teenage males and teenagers are notorious for endorsing an extremely commodified view of the world - men and males are encouraged to buy tons of 'bling' like cars, stereo system components and expensive suits etc. By their very positioning in such mags, in 'attractive' soft-porn poses, feminine models become all the items as the gizmos featured in the articles; as the reader 'must' own the right telephone to attain position, so he must have the 'right' woman.
Yet this frame of mind of the body as item is ironically trapping men up to women, and both sexes are in an emergency of identification. Men are achieved on a daily basis with conflicting images of themselves, from the original Action Man role of spouse, father, provider, patriarch, to the more sensitive, metro erotic Ken, whose position, like that of Barbie, is defined by how he looks and what he is the owner of. This crisis is really as important for men as for women; statistics show that young man suicides are increasing, there is a high surge in conditions of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in men, crime figures are growing, divorce rates are going through the rooftop, and with moms routinely given guardianship of the kids even the role of fatherhood itself has enter into question, exacerbated by the rising range of fertility clinics and the power for girls to so easily be solitary parents.
Role models such as Ken and Action Man are unquestionably as bad for young men as a job model such as Barbie can be to young women. No more seen as breadwinners, or the top of the family in a patriarchal culture, men are generally represented in the advertising by heroes such as Homer Simpson, a chauvinistic, ignorant man who's depicted as very lazy and obsessed with food; his son Bart, often cruel to his sister, is discourteous and ill behaved. He option is often portrayed as Ken, an idealized, de-sexualized guy with only the acquisition of materials items his goal, fast vehicles and fashion his only interests. Even television shows like Intimacy and the town imply men are just there for the erotic gratification of women. It portrays men as tactless, ridiculous beings that are only there for female entertainment and pleasure. These negative portrayals are as detrimental to both genders as the comparative behaviour to women, rooted as they are in gender objectification and the denial of id. Alternatively, could we welcome this shake-up of traditional gender images? Could it not be that multiplicities of jobs are now building themselves in modern society?
Toys such as Action Man often stereotype men in competitive roles, and this convention has been questioned in the work of Susan Hiller, who explores social conditioning and behaviour to years as a child in her work Punch and Judy.
Punch and Judy appears closely at the brutality of slapstick comedy. First filming sections of live Punch and Judy shows the artist then transposed these images on the walls of a square room welcoming the viewer to stand in the area with the puppets' images looming over them, the puppets acting out violently as frequently seen in their performances. Hiller examines how such stereotypical role-play in playthings reinforces the assumptions positioned on young boys and men and how they should act in contemporary society.
Where feminism struggled such patriarchal, capitalist opinion systems, post-feminism appears to be buying right into the 'raunch culture' that Kliszynski shows.
I would identify 'Raunch culture' as the complete juvenile, 'laddish' culture that includes the lads' publications as well as strip clubs, prostitution and the special event of prostitution, highly sexualized adverts and an over-all attitude that what's best about feminine empowerment is the fact that more men get to see more women naked. Berger referred to it as 'the male gaze', Kliszynski as 'raunch culture', but I believe they are extremely similar, and it appears to be embraced by many young women, who allow whole-heartedly the complete condescending nonsense of 'woman power'. According to Wollstonecraft, men have widened what should be merely a biological distance of physical dissimilarities into a sociological difference: 'But not quite happy with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring items for the moment. ' Women, it follows, cannot help but be 'intoxicated by the adoration which men, consuming their senses, pay them. '
Has Barbie, in representing the most materialistic aspects of modern day culture, stimulating a stereotypical image of womanhood, become a remorseless goddess of modern society? A doll with no communal conscience (or conscious), reliant entirely on material items to bring her enjoyment, worshipped by thousands and thousands, rep of a culture that objectifies and vilifies women, no facet of her suggests any form of spirituality, or more morality.
When Mary Wollstonecraft accused women of their own complicity in this stereotypical view of these gender she induced ripples of anger and irritability down the centuries. How could a 'so-called' feminist start her own making love with such accusations? And yet, when one needs the time to think about it, you can observe how right she was. Young girls play with Barbie dolls bought for the coffee lover by mothers and aunts, and will, to echo Rousseau, develop up to provide Barbie dolls with their daughters, thus fulfilling their 'destiny. ' They are really complicit in the encouragement of stereotypical worth. But what is the alternative? A woman may play with the 'stereotypical' playthings of girlhood such as dollies and prams, all pink and sparkly, mass marketed products enforced on them by a performative oriented culture, or she may play with the male version of such consumer items, Action Man, autos, trains, weapons. . . But what subject matter is really being delivered? If a woman plays with Barbie dolls, she is viewed with contempt to be a 'typical' young lady; if she performs with stereotypical boys toys and games, she attains value in the eye of society, for being more like a boy. No real matter what she will, Barbie girl can't ever achieve sociable value by being a girl, and post-feminism has been complicit in such social values.
Consuming Passions was posted in the '80s, author Judith Williamson's theory is hardly common knowledge, most likely because it is threatening. She deduces that, contrary to the ideal posed by Mattel and Barbie, "the attractive shape for a woman. . . is that of a son. "
The highly idealised Barbie has not been without competition, however. In 1998, Anita Roddick began an Anti-Barbie plan, under the guise of do it yourself -esteem.
Roddick started out marketing posters of the doll called 'Ruby: The Real Deal, ' with posters in the united kingdom shops she owned or operated, all depicting images of the generously proportioned doll with the attached slogan: 'There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels in support of 8 who do. '
With the intent of challenging stereotypes of beauty and countering the pervasive affect of the beauty products industry, and with a tongue in cheek methodology, the underlying message was far more serious and could easily be applied to the stereotypical image of female and the way western culture objectifies women. 'Ruby' began a worldwide argument about body image and self-esteem, but she was not universally loved. In the United States, the toy company Mattel directed a cease-and-desist order, requiring the images of Ruby were removed from American shop home windows because she was making Barbie look bad, an entrance surely, that Barbie's impossible to attain figure was harmful to girls in comparison to the more reasonable Ruby? In Hong Kong, posters of Ruby were prohibited on the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) because the specialists were concerned they might offend travellers. Like Barbie, Ruby was a de-sexualised toy, having no nipples, genitalia or pubic head of hair; other adverts on the MTR which revealed surgically enhanced, partly dressed female models, were allowed to stay. It is hard not to jump to the conclusion that it was the genuine portrayal of the female body that was offensive (and to whom? the male commuters?); in a global where the feminine body is identified to be always a purchasable status symbol, the male customers were presumably offended by the depreciation in value of these idealised fantasy.
Feminist designer Helen Chadwick (1954-1996) made many works that dealt immediately with the role and image of women in culture. In 'Ego Geometria Sum:The Laborers X' created in 1984, she possessed large replicas of children's solid wood bricks transposed with images of her naked self. You can read many meanings into this artwork: is Chadwick struggling with the weight of her own image? By superimposing her naked image onto a child's brick, is she recommending that she actually is only a plaything, a toy? She seems to compare herself to a troll doll, kept by the mane in a disembodied fist with an inane grin on its face. The troll doll is unattractive and deformed looking, and Chadwick is implying that this is how modern culture views her, and womanhood generally, from years as a child onwards, if one will not conform to how society wants one to be. All is not without trust though; Chadwick also portrays a door using one side of the brick, suggestive not only of closure, but also of the potential to open, to permit something in, or something out; a way of escape. To be a Jungian archetype, the entranceway also is consultant of the womanly, with all the current implications of any symbolic opening. Within this artwork, is Chadwick exploring issues of entrapment and get away?
Several of her works addresses the role and image of ladies in society using an array of materials, such as blooms, chocolate and beef. She questioned the role of the feminine body in artwork as a ornamental object; as decorative and aesthetic ideas about art themselves have been questioned in the 20th century. In 1990, she worked again on topics of sexual personal information and gender with her Cibachrome transparencies entitled 'Eroticism' which depict two brains side by side.
On the top, this is another apparently simple, if stunning, piece of work, but like the mind itself, this piece is made up of a multiplicity of tiers, waiting around to be explored and teased out. The work shows two brains, side by side, mirroring each other. On the edges adjoining, the brains are enlivened by what is apparently blue sparks, or flashes, suggesting brain activity. Based on the Wordsworth Dictionary of Symbolism, blue is the colour of the intellect, and of spirituality; it's the medium of truth. In Eroticism, Chadwick is playing with the idea of 'a appointment of two imagination', an interest based on the intellect and the emotions. Yet we also relate the color blue with something a bit naughty, somewhat risque, such as a 'blue movie', and I will suggest that Chadwick was also bearing in mind the theory that the mind is often referred to as the largest erotic organ in the torso. For Chadwick, in this piece at least, it is the attraction of two people based on a gathering of intellect and commonality that is important, not the outward appearance so vital to contemporary society.
In the 1790s, when Mary Wollstonecraft was writing A Vindication on the Rights of Women, she argued for the necessity for further civil rights for females, a reason which she believed could only be performed by permitting women a better education. She argued a woman was capable of any intellectual feat that a man was given and this her early on training shouldn't brainwash her into deference to men. Wollstonecraft believed that men discourage women from obtaining the same education that they receive routinely, and as long as women are denied this education, they can't ever hope to achieve equality with men. She creates on this lack of equivalent education for ladies in her debate adding that all men (modern to her) have an over-all lack of value.
Two hundred years later, in the 1970s, women were still preventing to do this basic level of admiration and equality in the academic and creative worlds, and it was the 1970s that found the beginnings of a fresh art movement, the Modern Feminist Art Movement. The movement was motivated by requirements for social, economic and political change and by the desire of feminine artists to force free galleries and museums to determine a fair representation of their work; there were very few feminine art teachers at that time, though the most students were feminine. It was common and broadly accepted for art exhibitions to contain the works of men only, women being discriminated against openly, with some needing to face the two times discriminatory blow of also being dark-colored. Faith Ringgold (b. 1930), an American musician, was informed she could only display in the museums specialized in African American skill after all of the black male performers had had their shows.
By the 1970s, feminists and artists had started building consciousness awareness organizations that shown at galleries and museums to expose a few of these sexist procedures, and exposed galleries together for additional exposure with their works.
With feminist painters attempting to go further than equal representation, their works were often packed with political and cultural content crying out for political change. The women's movements in America possessed one such artist by the name of Judy Chicago. Born in 1939, Chicago often reflected on issues relating to the lack of feminine representation in her work, stating 'Because we could denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of ranking after each other's shoulder blades and building after each other's hard earned accomplishments. '
Many female music artists voiced these views in those days, wishing to change traditional artwork and sculpture to add feminist awareness, with many exploring the female body with the objective of reclaiming the sexualised images that were created by the male musician that preceded them. Chicago's part 'Dinner Get together' called out for both skill critics and institutions (and the Establishment?) To readdress the fact that so many female artists had been and were being excluded from art work history text messages used to teach the (largely female) skill students currently going to the fine art education. This large work depicts a banquet, the options embroidered representations of the vulva in a style appropriate to the ladies being represented, women Chicago wished to honour, with an additional 999 women etched in gold on to the floor tiles. The geometric form of this part is attractive, with the table organized at a triangle, representing the tri-partite character of women, the maiden, the mom and the crone. Indeed, an upside down triangle has long been found in paganism to stand for the female.
This work has gone quite a distance in encouraging women artists to reclaim their individuality in representing the female form, and readdress the regular degradation of feminine genitalia previously represented in male-created fine art.
The Dutch musician Christina Camphausen (b. 1953) is another exemplory case of a female designer purpose on reclaiming for girls the representation of the feminine genitalia, submitting a reserve of her use the vulva as sole subject matter. Entitled 'Yoni Portraits', it is filled with delicate drawings exposing the vulva in every it's beauty and variety, images that are sometimes natural and sometimes symbolic.
Taken from early Sanskrit, the term Yoni refers to the vulva and womb and better describes femininity than its clinical counterpart (vagina) or its crude pornographic variants (cunt); in India's sacred dialect it carries an inherent value for this close part of your woman's body which is lacking in English. Within the book's accompanying text messages, the artist makes clear that there is nothing about the Yoni to be ashamed of. Somewhat, this is a body-part which in many ethnicities has had very different connotations of electric power, beauty, fertility and pleasure.
Of her drive, Christina says:
With might work, I endeavour to assist in rebuilding the Yoni to her
rightful and original host to honour, and also to stimulate everyone to
regard her with admiration, to recognize her beauty and mysterious power.
Though the last decades make it seem our modern societies are
sexually liberated, there still rests a taboo upon this romantic part of our
bodies. In general, women enjoy more flexibility than they used to have,
yet it really is no progress in self-determination that lots of modern day women have their seductive, lower lips corrected in order to conform
to some unnatural standard approved by plastic surgeons or
professional nude models in glossy magazines.
To make artwork with the vagina as your subject matter is still a very brave action, as it is a subject that is often considered improper and generally thought of within the context of pornography, and, in almost all conditions, for the exclusive pleasure of men. Many feminists have attempted to remove these prurient connotations by pushing us to consider vaginas, something not to be ashamed of, but as powerful and expressive components to be proudly secured as an assertive and positive manifestation of your being. Exhibitions are actually needs to show that has changed considerably lately, with many musicians and artists who have contained imagery of the Vagina in their works exhibiting along.
One such exhibition, sorted out by Francis M. Naumann and David Nolan, and entitled 'The Visible Vagina' occurred on January 28, 2010 at the David Nolan Gallery in NY and included artworks by people ranging from Judy Chicago and Nancy Grossman to Robert Mapplethorpe and Pablo Picasso. The most interesting aspect for me personally is that there is such a strong male occurrence in the exhibition, and even it was assemble by men, a potent indication of how things have progressed.
The most striking work in the exhibition for myself must be the task of Sarah Davis and the piece 'Britney (Notorious), ' for among over one hundred artworks, very few of which objectify women or suggest a salacious use of imagery, this piece, a painting identical to a paparazzi-type photograph used of the music superstar, hovers between art work and porn; indeed, in its representation of both, it beggars the question of how art and porn can be resolved within feminist issues.
If we admit that art is supposed to encourage the spectator on many levels, academically and emotionally, and this porn is required to stimulate on a purely intimate level, I ask yourself how this transformation from paparazzi photo and all the connotations of furtiveness, spying and secretiveness to painting can transform ones conception.
I wish to believe that the musician who views Britney Spears as a solid, confident, self-made female is a feminist who has staged the initial photo to "reclaim" her personal information by revealing her vagina just as in 'Yoni Portraits', believing there is nothing at all to be ashamed of by exhibiting the power, beauty, fertility and joy this body part presents. Often in the media gaze, Spears is employed as an example to criticise young women today, only a Barbie doll. Her capabilities as a mother, her profession and sociable life are frequently organized to general population scrutiny. Men that are in the public gaze however, may be criticised for his or her affairs, heir drug dependency, their fights etc. , yet rarely for their dress code or indeed for their roles or skills as fathers. This is a gender bias that has become commonplace and generally accepted.
In addition, when Spears chose to wear a revealing dress and decorate her body with piercings and tattoos, the tabloids turned on her viciously, and accused her of mental health problems when she publicly shaved her head of hair off. I feel though, that Spears was mailing a note, via the media, about her sense of identity and her value as a female. By shaving her mane off Spears was questioning the men notion of femaleness and femininity; she was a Rapunzel trapped by her beauty in a tower created by the male gaze. The only way to take control of the situation also to avoid, was, like Rapunzel, to chop off all her wild hair and reassert her own id away from public expectations and the media's critical portrayal of women. In Ways of Witnessing, John Berger explores the difference between nudity and nakedness, recommending that when some may be nude, the spectator (and there should be one) merely sees the body unclothed. When one is naked, the spectator (even if that is merely oneself) sees the true essence of the individual. Nakedness is far more seductive than nudity. When Spears take off all her head of hair it was as though she possessed removed a disguise, and exhibited herself to the globe fully naked, expressing her inner self. It is this aspect that Davis has picked up on in her piece of art: Britney Spears as a style of gender positive feminism, the un-Barbie goddess of post-feminism.
Sex positive feminism, also called sexually liberal feminism or sex-radical feminism commenced as a movement in the 1980s. Many women became involved with a direct response to the initiatives of anti-porn feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, as they argued that pornography was the centre of feminist theory for women's oppression.
This period is known as the 'feminist intimacy wars, ' a period of heated question between anti-porn feminists and sex-positive feminists, between the notions of the love-making industry as an abusive and violent environment for girls and the values in women's capacity to prefer to get highly intimate beings - and raises the question of who is exploiting who?
When Spears posed for a statue by North american sculptor Daniel Edwards (b. 1965) for the pro-life movement, she was once again steeped in the controversy of 'is it art work or is
it porn?' Entitled 'Monument to Pro-Life' this work is a complete size sculpture of your naked Britney Spears in childbirth. The sculpture shows Spears on all fours on a bearskin rug, her oral cavity slightly open up and her eyelids heavy, looking as if she is about to cry out. There is no indication of pain or pleasure; it is not whatsoever indicative of erotic provocation or pornography. Her hands lie covered around either part of the head of the keep, as if she is using it to act as a medium to the nature world communicating with the animalistic urges childbirth conjures up. Yet the press has criticised this piece, stating that: 'Britney's ready that most would sooner connect with getting pregnant than with having a baby. '
I believe in some ways things have deteriorated somewhat than progressed: the wonder industry and the porn industry, in their own sometimes-converging ways, have induced a lot of that. Heading back to the first '70s, as women started out to enter in the labor force in larger statistics, some of that earning ability was used against them by competitive beauty product marketing. The effect has been an increasing focus in the last three decades on dieting, an explosion in both sexes of bulimic and anorexic eating disorders and body dysmorphia. . These body image issues are sometimes fatal. The plastic surgery industry has strengthened these behaviour by encouraging visitors to work on these dysmorphic tendencies and, as in Piercy's poem, take off the offending areas of the body. The overwhelming bulk (about 98%) of these clients are women. (I would like to differentiate here between cosmetic surgery, used to change looks, and cosmetic surgery, used to rebuild people).
In addition, pornography is a multi-billion money global industry. The vast majority of the porngraphy out there targeted at heterosexual men and is incredibly degrading to women. Women tend to be depicted as passive, as secretly always attempting to be dominated sexually, and tend to be referred to as 'bitches', 'whores' and 'cunts'. Men are depicted as aggressors who have an insatiable cravings for gender, and whose manhood is defined insurance firms repeated rapacious sex with women. The porn industry has affected the style industry in terms of both style (just how models are posed) and content (thongs used to be worn by only strippers and porn stars).
Women are extremely under-represented in positions of real electricity in the marketing - there are incredibly few station managers and programme directors who are women. Adding it all along, it means women are much more likely than ever to be judged on appearances, to be observed as passive, and to generally be objectified, and also have less capacity to mitigate that through productive control of the mass media. Raunch culture is an outgrowth of this and fuels the cycle.
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One example of that convergence in the beauty industry and the porn industry is seen in the work of Cindy Sherman (1954- ), with her use of shop mannequins and dolls. Store mannequins often intended to be sexy, making love sells, after all, but Sherman pushes this idea to depict dolls in explicitly erotic situations that are unsettling to view, calling in your thoughts a doll's (unadvertised) work as a child's tool to explore sexuality.
"Untitled Film Still #255
The doll in "Untitled Film Still #255 (1992) has been fixed with genuine (if hairless) genitalia and is surrounded by typical household items (hairbrush, rope) that, in the framework of the doll's doggy-style position, become S&M objects of torture and pleasure. Known for her transforming self portraiture, Sherman has experimented wildly with mannequins and dolls through picture taking. The joint parts of her mannequins are pronounced, calling focus on their inanimate-ness, they are often built in with exaggerated or hyper-realistic intimate and reproductive organs, wrinkles and body wild hair, which normally you'll not see or correlate with Barbie or action man or dolls generally.
Just as Kliszynski, s highly provocative photographic artwork along with his use of Barbie, Cindy Sharmen has been evaluating those parameters of suitable pornographic content for the last 30yrs. Her work has caused much controversy due to the fact that Sherman herself is a vibrant part of her work, and also that the audiences of her art "are given no hint of what to think or feel. " ( 20)Sherman, p. 8) going out of her artwork frequently available to debate. Born in New Jersey and the youngest of five children, she put in her childhood as many other girls do, painting, playing "decorate", and as many in her technology were she was consumed with the new technology of television. This fascination of this new technology can be seen reflected throughout her career and her many artworks are structured around the mass media of film. Sherman received her Bachelor's level in Picture taking from the faculty of Art work at their state College School of NY in Buffalo. And her first exhibition was of seventy Untitled Film Stills considered between 1977 and 1980. (20)Sherman, p. 193)
A great deal of the criticism Sherman receives is due to her "self-portraits", because she dresses up as heroes in arranged images, often producing a difficulty of separating her image from the underlying content and designs addressed in her work. Yet in her work Untitled Film Stills # 66-77 she herself seems to address this issue directly. She looks without halloween costumes, make-up, and wearing only a bathrobe, and in her next series Untitled Film Stills #79-89 she appears as the complete opposite. Closely staged, she actually is wearing different costumes and make-up in an almost theatrical methodology. In a comparability of the two exhibitions, she is saying to the viewer, this is I, this is who I am "dressing up" as if a figure. Almost endeavoring to validate that her fine art is not really a "self-portrait". ( 200 Sherman p. 8-9)
Sherman has had many recurring designs in her work including the male gaze, feminine vulnerability, and gender identity, with many of her Untitled Film Stills addressing gender and stereotype issues. Often encouraging the viewer to examine their own perceptions of such, which is in her Untitled Film Stills that she frequently analyzes gender id, with "lessons in femininity" often portrayed through "cinema about the dominating culture's preferred values and behaviours. "( (22) Mauer, p. 94) Yet Sherman's work frequently criticized for attacking "male-gaze" and the voyeuristic fetish of feminine vulnerability. Amelia Jones areas this straight in Signs or symptoms, " Cindy Sherman's self-portrait untitled film stills from around 1980, in their extreme flirtation with simulation and absence, clearly play on the structure of the gaze and its own capacity to fetishize (to freeze or job as thing) what lies in its purview. "
A large number of of Sherman's Untitled Film Stills display feminine weakness (generate Mary Wollstonecraft ) with her strategy of specific camera sides enhancing the "male-gaze" she is able to produce within the viewer a mixture of fear and eroticism.
Yet with the example image, "Untitled Film Still #255 (1992) she's received much criticism for the task being pornographic, unlike previous Untitled Film Stills Sherman is not in physical form area of the work, using mannequins instead. Mannequins and Barbie dolls that she positions and phases with unmistakably artificial backgrounds.
It would be quite easy to expect that Sherman could have been influenced by the work of Helmut Newton (1920-2004) particularly in her work handling the male gaze. Newton was a In german Australian professional photographer, his work often used mannequins to point out the falseness of the style industry and there ridiculous ideology of beauty,
The two Violetta's during intercourse, Paris, 1991
Violetta (above) confronts her reflection image, questioning what has more value in the fashion world, flesh or plastic? Newton often attempted the assignments of mannequins and living models, often pairing real life dummies and women together (as above) or posing mannequins in public areas and models in interior configurations to create delicate disorientation. He frequently places real human models in stiff, awkward positions as though their bodies had limited flexibility like mannequins. Even in his recent work "vogue September 2003" Newton has used the Actress Nicole Kidman in a doubtful pose, drawing an uncomfortable parallel between mannequins, the feminine, celebrity, and doll, she initially looks to be void of genitalia, a present that would be well suited as some type of "Extremely Barbie"
Nicole Kidman vogue Sept 2003
Many of Newton's works depict dolls and mannequins in erotic situations, just as in Sherman's work, they could be questioning a doll's (unadvertised) function as a child's tool to explore sexuality. They unquestionably question the media's ongoing portrayal of women as a commodity, and the 'raunch culture' that Kliszynski shows in his work, but could one question how small this department between discovering a child's sexuality and exploiting it is becoming ? These images of Barbie as seen so frequently in lots of the musicians and artists work could be recognized as resembling "Sex dolls" alternatively than childrens toys, as 'The goal of feminism, ' said an early spokeswoman, 'was to change the type of artwork itself, to convert culture in sweeping and long lasting ways by adding involved with it the heretofore suppressed perspective of women.
Newton's image of Nicole Kidman takes on a striking resemblance compared to that of the work of sculptor Allen Jones (1937-) His work is fused with Mannequins posing as humans depicting forniphilia (intimate objectification is manifested in a submissive partner acting as a bit of furniture) The ladies "mannequins" have well endowed voluptuous proportions and resemble a blow up doll rather than store mannequin, yet they can be positioned in the role of the "domestic" subject, they identify with the have difficulty women have determining themselves from such stereotyping:
"Seat, " "Stand, " and "Head wear stand, " 1969
Jones' work has been frequently referred to as misogynistic. Yet his work is surely similar to that of Sherman and Newton in the manner it shows the oppression of women, witnessing them as objects.
For anyone to read the work in virtually any other way is surely to defend myself against a purely "Literal" reading. Jones himself stated, "I got reflecting on and commenting on exactly the same situation that was the source of the feminist activity. It was regrettable for me that I produced the perfect image to allow them to show how women were being objectified. " If one, was to take this "literal" reading and ask the question of why Jones hasn't made a man equivalent for example? Surely, this is the point, that there surely is none of them, as men are not ever viewed in this manner by society. In addition, as for dolls, toys and games, men/guys are encircled by toys and games that encourage building, reasoning and competition, yet girls are given toys and games that encourage medical/nurturing, beauty, creativity related and feeling based. Toys haven't been more polarized in relation to genders which will surely be one aspect each one of these works have drawn attention to.
Mary F. Rogers claims in her article "Hetero Barbie" that "Barbie illustrates what feminists and culture critics have been saying for some years. In no uncertain terms Barbie shows that femininity is a manufactured reality. It includes a whole lot of artifice, a great deal of clothes, a whole lot of props such as cuddly poodles and shopping totes, and a lot of effort, however gratifying sometimes" (Rogers 95).
Rogers, Mary F. "Hetero Barbie?" Gender, Contest, and School in Press: a Content material Reader 2: 94-97
In addition, that "manufactured truth" could also been observed in Jones' work as the ladies themselves become those items of produce. Resonating with those values and ideologies they as young girls have been unveiled too, so that as adults commonly accepted. With Kliszynski addressing the 'raunch culture' and mass media, and the ideologies that are displayed in toys, constantly digested by children, it brings to brain what James Lull published in his article "Hegemony" where he states "The mass media help create an impression that even society's roughest edges ultimately must conform to the conventional contours of dominant ideologies" (Lull 64).
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Contemporary Feminist Fine art Movement. The activity was inspired by demands for social, financial and politics change and by the desire of female artists to force free galleries and museums to establish a fair representation with their work
Chapter V
ROLAND BARTHES: THE UNCULTURE OF IDEOLOGY
Language can either help or impede a person get good at
the contradictions of his environment. In expressing that artwork
does the first, ideology, the next, and this how it can it
is through framework, this thesis has purposely remaining open
the details about mass culture. How exactly does mass culture
reorient perception and through understanding habit? Until
now, the question has been responded by warring sides. Adorno
maintained it anesthetized people; Benjamin and Brecht,
that it helped bring the masses to their own.
Roland Barthes presents something of your bargain
between these positions. To Benjamin, he concedes that
mechanical culture is completely objective; to Adorno, that
secondary meanings nestle in this objectivity (although the
deception that continues on is through words, never hypnosis).
With Brecht, he is of one head that aesthetics unlock the
limits of ideology. In the ultimate analysis, he tends to acknowledge
with Adorno, but also for reasons that are regular with Benja-
min and Brecht.
Roland Barthes' writings on skill and ideology, while
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Barbie is the Skill World's Muse
is a unique ICON for the 21st Century
In order of appearance:
Barbie in "Venus by Milo"; Barbie in "Female Using the Pearl Earring, " by Vermeer.
Barbie in "Mona Lisa", by Leonardo Davinci; Barbie within an Erwin Blumenfeld-shot Vogue cover.
Barbie as Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel; Barbie as the Statue of Liberty, by Bartholdi.
Barbie in a Helmut Newton picture; Barbie as Nefertiti.
Barbie in Man Ray photo; Barbie in The Beatles' Yellow Submarine Album Cover.
Barbie in "Dora Maar", by Picasso; Barbie in "The Portrait of Sylvia von Harden", by Otto Dixx.
