Women, Power, Protest at Birmingham Museum

Great trip to a museum.  I'm really glad Jill put me on to this one.

Sue Richardson, Burnt Breakfast, 1975

I can't say this appeals to me, but I like the use of craft as a serious textile medium, while expressing her frustrations at being a housewife.  Housewife is not a term used much in the 21st century.  Is it because society now realises women do not marry a house.  Or is it that Government policy want women working at all times so they are contributors, not claimants, and earn their state pension with their own contributions, so the term housewife has been dropped?

Mary Kelly, Post Partum series, part vi. 

 I love Mary Kelly's work.  I like the way she has used lots of words, which describe the situation and emotion of her circumstances.  She ignores the art history tendency to sentimentalise the mother/child relationship, but depicts it as a demanding and difficult process through which both develop.  Kelly believed in non-essentialist feminism.  Not that a women's place was physically determined, but that it was created by her experiences.  This is what I'm interested in - how people's experiences create their value systems.  Post Part documents are an analysis of not just what this woman is, but the process by which she becomes those things.  There is a lot of personal, emotional payload. So when she was using dirty nappies, these were just materials around her that conveyed a narrative of her experience.

My work does not use the bodies of women (other than my own!) to represent them, but the tools they use and the objects that they create.  Does this enable me to say anything about the 'layered social and physical burdens placed on women's role"?  

Interesting that the venue put in a warning about Margaret Harrison's work, about rape as described in newspapers ie easily accessed publications which don't have a warning on the cover.  

I like the quote from Lucy Lippard

Birmingham Museum has made some very good artwork statements,
that explain the circumstances of the artwork or its previous display.

Margaret Harrison, Rape.  

 She has a top line of images from famous art history images that demonstrate how women have been represented as sexually available, then a row of newspaper clippings demonstrating how in the 1970s, sex offences by squaddies was defended by the Military, on the grounds that a prison sentence would affect the criminal's career!

1970s newspaper clippings of actual court cases

Quotes from Judge Sutcliffe

Definition of rape and statistics.

Tesco tried to defend their underwear stocks.

And while 40 years later, rapist knickers would not be in a supermarket, M&S have recently been criticised for window displays at Christmas that deem 'must haves' to be suits and clean shirts for fully dressed men in the window, yet are frilly knickers for semi-clad women in the window!.  Hmmm!

Sonia Boyce, 1985

I like Sonia Boyce's work for how she deals with inappropriate behaviour, and uses the cropping technique on the man, that is so often used to reduce the agency of women.

I like the way this gives the point of view of a minority group.  It expresses very well, things that I might not realise from my own standpoint.

While I love this art that can be so challenging, because it points out and criticises how women are treated, my own work chooses to focus on the positives about women.  I think my art would be less likely to be attacked by critics than that shown above (which has often been castigated).  One that comes to mind is a show by Margaret Harrison that was closed because she portrayed Hugh Hefner as a bunny girl (which was closed for indecency as he was a man, yet porn magazines were indecent and allowed to be sold because they portrayed women!).