Alexandra Kokoli and Clare Gannaway
Alexandra started with Laura Mulvey and The Male Gaze. (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 2009 and 1975). Mulvey is a filmmaker and feminist activist, not a theorist.
Scopophilia (pleasure in looking) when taken in the man looking at woman context reduces the woman to spectacle. Male gaze is about knowledge, power, pleasure. Not visual but perspectival and defined in terms of social relations.
Mulvey considered the active/passive heterosexual division of labour in film. Shots of men are of him doing something active; shots of women are of her being inactive (or decorative). This made me think of James Bond films!
AK showed Andy Dwyer, Parks and Recreation S4 E18 as an example of when men don't get women's role. (Watch this).
'What recurs overall is a constant return to woman not ... , as a visual image but as a subject of inquiry' Mulvey 2009:130
Mulvey wrote an angry essay in Spare Rib at critiquing Allen Jones and Chair. 'You don't know what's happening do you, Mr Jones'. His Chair piece was originally designed for the film Clockwork Orange - but was rejected! He claimed he made it as a piece of Forniphilia (depicting people as furniture, as part of fetishism). AK also showed Jemima Stehli Chair 1997/8 which was made as a feminist response to Chair (I found it even more disturbing and not feminist at all. A copy of Chair, but the woman model has no knickers or laced gloves. Class discussion felt original Chair had underwear in order for it to be taken off).
When women portrayed themselves, female artists showed themselves painting. Laura Knight, names herself and the model. 'Laura Knight with model, Ella Louise Naper ('Self Portrait') 1913.
AK compared some imagery when painted by men and women. Susanna and the Elders:
Tintorette - Susanna looking at self in mirror - vanity, making self available to the men.
Gentileschi - Susanna resisting lewd men.
Faith Ringgold - exhibition at New Serpentine Gallery June-September 2019 (Also FR doing talk on 6 June at 25 New Lion Yard - .... AND I'VE GOT A TICKET!). She does story quilts about black women's lives . Much quilts. Hybrid of history and people, and fiction. Adds her black fictional character, Willia, in various ways to art history.
Picasso Desmoiselles d'Avignon.
Ringgold Picasso's Studio. When FR was a young artist, she worked as a model to pay her way. Self portrait as nude - looks bored in her quilt. She talks to black sex workers - experience of being exoticised. They are realists - 'if being an artist does not work out, remember you're sitting on an asset!'. Similarities between her work and Picasso's: interest in African masks. Masks on her quilts, and masks were collected by Picasso. Considers the mask as indicative of female sexuality - dangerous, unknown and desirable.
Claudette Johnson. Oxford exhibition on now. BLK art group. Pastel on wood. Deliberately unfinished. Nocolourbar.com. Black body as active. Resonates with boundaries space for black women.
Woman with an earring (two female symbol earrings - lesbian symbols).
Senzeni Marasela. Covering Sarah Baartman. Hottentot woman brought to England with promises of riches, but used as freak show exhibit for her physical body. Pseudo scientific interest. Marasela works in monochrome - red. Embroidery indicates scarring, reparation and bleeding. She died and parts of her head, and genitalia were preserved in museums. Nelson Mandela asked for her body to be returned to SA for interment and this was thankfully done.
Susan Hiller. 10 months. Female experience - 10 lunar months of pregnancy. Artistic creation and procreation. Ideological or practical? No baby shown. Female body as unknowable, as a universe.
Mary Kelly Manicure/Pedicure series 1974. Her artwork considers the relationship between mother and child as the child moves from infant to speaking subject; non-speaking too speaking. Primapara - veers too abstraction. Regimes of daily care. Intimacy of infant flesh. Lots about women and labour. Women and work.
Sonia Boyce. Considers what other representations can be made by the gaze. Hybrid UK/Caribbean taste in colour and pattern in a British house. Two social beings in the same space. Works with collaborations with people, and cacophony in pattern.
I asked what her definition of the female gaze was. AK said she did not have one. She recommended Bracha Ettinger. The Matrixial Gaze. Loosen that border. Defines the problem as how men look at women. The concept of self and other is very stable. Gender not as definite as in Mulvey's context. Demolish the one-ness of the male gaze. States masculinity is not the problem; one-ness is the problem. (I think this means the single point of view of the viewer is the problem).
In conversation
Clare Gannaway, Manchester Art Gallery - Sonia Boyce, 6 Acts. Museum takeover.
2017 Sonia Boyce Retrospective. 1990s to present. More than her 1980s work, when she was working with black, female identity. In the mid 1990s started working in an open, improvised, collaborative way.
Living artists want to do something new with real people. Clare Gannaway had conversation with SB and other curators while walking through static, long-hung galleries. Gallery 10 had not been rehung since 2002. Takeover format. One evening a group takeover the gallery. Feminist takeovers etc. But actually have very little impact, eradicated after the event. Gallery 10 called In Pursuit of Beauty. Decided on performance, brought in drag artists from the nearby gay village. Play with gender.
Anna Phylactic, Cheddar Gorgeous (unicorn), Lasane Shabazz (Ira Aldridge), Licquorice Black (Sappho); Venus Vienna (Nymph). Gave questions and text about artworks on display. Removed Hylas and the Numphs from the Gallery, for one week only. Contextualised language about the bodies on display. Who's pursuing whom? What message does calling a woman in an image 'femme fatale' give? Asked for notes to be stuck to the wall with visitors response to this image being removed. Varied responses were received.
An attendee at the evening event, evidently uncomfortable about this takeover, went to the Guardian, and Jonathon Jones wrote a polemic opinion piece about the event, without researching or attending it, but writing on hearsay. The attendee stated Manchester Art Gallery was censoring Hylas and the Nymphs and had permanently removed it from display.
Gallery 10 - whose power on display? They chose to look at the stories and language used to describe them, in the pictures on display. Empire; race; intersecting narrative. Redisplay. Bring different things out from store.
Impact on artists career by what the curator chooses to display. Positive and negative questions for the curator.
Clare Gannaway resists the press preview show for takeovers. Purpose is art making and change and dialogue, not footfall from traditionalists. Pop-up shows need legacy. Lots of outreach work as curators. Sometimes, like with Hylas and the Nymphs, there is a lot of anger directed at the curator when the event offends the more conservative end of the audience. But the role of the curator in a public art museum, with public funds, is not as a custodian, but as a facilitator.
Need to go beyond representation but go to a process that changes.
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