Vanessa Bell, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant in mirror

Great show.  It was the former Director's policy (now working at a gallery in Canada) to hold exhibitions where there was a gap in the market - artists not often shown in a solo show.  (I've seen Winifred Knights, Vanessa Bell and Escher at Dulwich Picture Gallery).

Bell household - tolerance and creativity; pacifism, atheism, homosexuality and open marriage.  Informality and honesty were highly prized (not sure how this fits with their frequent sexual intrigues with each other and underlying jealousies and competitiveness, particularly between Virginia and Vanessa).   Female subjects were portrayed with new agency (what does agency mean?) and force.  The curator of this show was female.

VB influenced by Singer Sargent.  Uses gesture to express character with simplicity and deftness - hmm, does this fit with my self portrait using silhouettes?  Her works are of their time - she did a mirror image of Duncan Grant - just when the Rokeby Venus had just been vandalised by the Suffragettes.  Her work also included a celebration of the imperfect - often chose wonky pots to buy, often painted flowers, cloth, and pots.  Image of daughter - intensely concentrating - pursuing her own interests - reading - gesture indicates concentration by the post - head down, shoulders forward, toes in.

Vanessa Bell, Angelica reading.

Tute with Linden

Quick work - collage/rubbing/stitch
Create some intentional combinations
Malleable
Exploring Values - mine - women.  Composition  (I think I have already done this - Linden may not have seen it.)

Contact Sophie - permission to see her report - re content analysis.

You cannot fail - a result is still a result.  (I think to fail is good.  It shows a preparedness to get things wrong, to go beyond the safe and the certain.  It shows working towards an unclear destination, with the surety of hitting a pre-conceived target or standard.  Oh joy - challenging modern education requirement to 'pass' or 'meet an standard', or even worse be deemed 'not yet ready').

Respect : equal.  (NO!!!  Head towards 'equitable - fair, reasonable).

Look up Girl as mere thing - Carol Duncan.

Fear/aggressive/power - male imaginary.  Previous female subservience.

Sexually powerful/vamp.  The sexually powerful bit, was a later manifestation of the vamp.

What is equality?

Man character - achievement values  (I think I have covered this in my status sketchbook)

Women's values - figment of male imaginary?  For self or porn?

What are the characteristics of a representation.  What are the characteristics of a woman represented as an equal?

Vamp - equal?

Earned - respect (not demanded)

Critiquing Methodology presentation

Our class have started presenting our analysis of our methodology.  My presentation was quite critical of what I had done to explore the context of how women are represented in museums and galleries.  I had discovered I had been to 21 exhibitions!!  I had started by trying out quantitative analysis and made it far, far too complex.  Then I went on to do qualitative analysis, which I found more successful.  As usual I had confused 'working hard' with 'hard work'.  By gathering too much (irrelevant) data, I made hard work of it.

Feedback:

Which museums are Guerrilla Girls working on?

Leave out 'positive'  - it is judgemental. - (I got the question wrong Are Museums representing women respectfully/positively.  I had not defined either respectful or positive.  It was a closed question.  I should have known better with my recruitment background!.  A better question would have been "How do Museums represent women?")

Very hard on yourself about the failing and not getting it right - it is more a continual refinement

What are the characteristics of respectful?

Positive - is it another way of saying respectful?  (Yes! see above.)

List out the characteristics of a positive image.  (This would depend on the nature of the image).

Numbers are not working on the content analysis - are you being too complex, and why not both forms of analysis.  (Yes, use both)

The Guerrilla Girls chose who to focus on, so you can find holes in their approach.  They narrowed down then hit:  an effective method to raise the point.

Add historians and critics - raise the cultural network - getting the critical purchase.

Approaching from a binary gender perspective - go and see the Radical Eye exhibition at Tate.

Eroticised image of the male 1930s, women female vamp 1900s of the cultural form is historical/dateable, then you could pin your analysis to this.  Look at the characteristics with some analysis, could be the chance to get some purchase.

Map out your understanding of a positive image - do this in reverse.  The negative thesis.
How impotent is 'positive' should it not be 'equal'.  (I don't want equal - it implies sameness, and counting numbers.  A better word is equitably - just, and right, fair and reasonable).

This would make life easier for the 'counting exercise'.  How about categorising them - e.g. personification/vehicle.

Try Woman's Hour exhibition.  Statistic (13/02) R4.

Susan Bordo - The Body and the Reconstruction of Femininity. p90-105

Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues the body is a powerful symbolic form.  Foucault argues the body is a practical site of social control.  " Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, … culture is 'made body', … converted into automatic, habitual activity".  "Foucault reminds us of the primacy of practice over belief. … The organisation and regulation of … our daily lives, our bodies are trained… with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of self hood, desire, masculinity and femininity.  … For women, are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long … time.  …  Through the pursuit of an elusive ideal of femininity, … females bodies have become docile bodies … focussed on self modification.  Through these disciplines, we … memorise … the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough.  

"The discipline of the female body … has to be acknowledged as a … durable and flexible strategy of social control.  Contemporary preoccupation with appearance … affects women far more … than men."

"Power is a network of practices, institutions and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain.  We need an analysis adequate to describe a power whose central mechanisms are … constitutive, a power bent on generating forces.  Particularly in the realm of femininity where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, … analysis of power from below, … of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate ... desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our … normalcy and deviance.

"We need a discourse, insisting on the necessity of objective analysis of power relations, will allow us to confront the mechanisms by which the subject becomes enmeshed in collusion with forces that sustain her own oppression.

"Our culture still widely advertises domestic concepts of femininity, ideological moorings that cast woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer.  Women nurture and feed others not the self, and construe desires for self nurturance … as greedy and excessive . an other-oriented emotional economy. ...That female hunger - for public power, for independence,  … - be contained and the public space that women .. take up be circumscribed.

"  Young women today ..are taught … 'feminine' virtues, … that they must also learn to embody the 'masculine' language and values of that arena self control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery… men's wear look etc.  The 'male' virtues of control and self mastery.

"  The young male hero says ' she's tough and cool, but warm and alluring.  … Femininity intersects with the masculine values of the public arena … a double bind.  The result is a parody. In this image bedazzled culture, we find it increasingly difficult to discriminate between parodies and possibilities for the self.

The intelligible body … (has) a set of practical rules … a useful body.  In the early 1970s the objectification of the female body was a serious political issue.  The cultural paraphernalia of femininity, of learning to please through the practice of the body … was seen as crucial to maintaining gender domination.  (By whom - men or women).  The study of cultural representations of the female body has flourished but divorced from consideration of their relation to the practical lives of bodies, can obscure and mislead. (I think this is not about what we look like but what we do.  This is where my work moves representation of women forward).

Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.

This time I am going to take Linden's advice, and use direct quotes from Butler's work, and see whether I can use them in my essay, correctly attributed as quotes.

P402/3  Simone de Beauvoir claims "one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman", through a stylised repetition of acts.  Gender is instituted through the stylisation of the body, … and must be understood as the mundane way … bodily gestures, movements and enactments … constitute the … abiding gendered self.  The appearance of substance is … a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors … come to believe and to perform.  Gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts …, a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of style.

Such acts constitute the identity of the actor, as a compelling illusion, an act of belief.  Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo.  In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status.

P403/4  Embodied existence assumes meanings in the context of lived experience.  The existence ... of the material dimensions of the body are not denied but reconvened as distinct from … cultural meanings.  The body is … a continual and incessant materialisation of possibilities.  Gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. … Those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.  Gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender and without those acts there would be no gender at all.  Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.  The tact collective agreement to perform and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fiction is obscured by the credibility of its own production.

P405  Phenomenology shares with feminist analysis a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience.  Feminist theory has sought to understand how systemic, pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts, and how the analysis of ostensibly personal situations is clarified through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context.  Feminism delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me.

P406 Latent in the personal is political formulation of feminist theory, a supposition that the life-world of gender relations is constituted … through the … acts of individuals.  … The body becomes its gender through a series of acts which … are consolidated through time.  The gendered body is the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined … fact.  This sedimentation … has produced a set of corporeal styles which, … appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist and a binary relation to one another.

P409 There are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender. … One does it in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions.  Gender is an act which has been rehearsed (by society).   The complex components that go into an at must be distinguished in order to understand the kind of acting , which acting one's gender invariably is. ...  The repeated performance is a re-enactment … of a set of meanings already socially established … the mundane and ritualised form of their legitimation.  This "action is immediately public as well. … The performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame.  The gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretationswithin the confines of already existing directives.

Uncreative Writing, Written material in the digital age - Kenneth Goldsmith.

Talks a lot about appropriation of created material and how writers get wound up about it, and other makers do not.

Don't get blinded by new materials, for they do not substitute for new ideas.  LeWitt.  This resonates with me - I am working in cross stitch, using silk thread, on even weave linen.  This is hardly innovative. But I feel it is appropriate or me to use this media, particularly while I am working out my ideas on why I want to value women.

Tutorial with Linden

I had a good,  long, tute with Linden.  This time I took in my latest sketchbook and sampler.

I told Linden about my rubbings of the Monster cream soda bottle (dug out of Vanda's allotment) and how I had been thinking about embodiment - rubbings inspired by my sense of touch on the embossing on the bottle, and how a burp feels when coming up - and how moving the paper when doing a rubbing   gives a visual interpretation of the bodily feeling.  I spoke about Toril Moi and her description of the Monster Woman - one who the patriarchal society has defined as not operating with selflessness.  Linden was also taken with the Design Museum postcard of prototype engine oil bottles and my 'burp paper'.

We spoke about the papery feel of honesty leaves, and how the physicality of them fitted with the conceptual idea of honesty as a trait.  They appear translucent yet strong.  But when put to the test, they break and shatter easily when pressure is brought to bear.  The latin name is Lunaria (little moons), so the concept of honesty does not fit with the latin name - where does the English name come from?

Linden observed that I used a lot of words and script in my artwork - which I do.

We had a bit of a debate about metaphor and Malafouris and Johnson.  Linden thinks I am in a field of thought that has not been fully explored.  Need to think more about this.

We had a look at my sampler.  I unrolled it for the first time in ages, and was actually quite impressed by what it looked like.  Linden advised that I should plan out some of my next interventions.  Maybe do some cutouts, and position and photograph them before I decide and stitch.  A useful documentation of process.  She liked the purple/white/green colours - an approximation of the suffragettes colours - as close as I can get in the hand dyed threads I am using.

Linden also advised I read and note key quotes on the front of index cards.  Then put my interpretation and application to my work on the back.  When writing my essay, I then put all the quotes in order, turn over, and I should have the key points for my essay, in the right order.  Great tip.