Artists

Judy Chicago 1939.
The 'Dinner Party' of 1979 is heralded as one of the most influential feminist art works ever. Chicago is a feminist icon, establishing feminism in America, and influentialy the world. 'Dinner Party' acknowledges the people (women) who were not physically present at the Last Supper, she refers to the them (the ewomen) as the ones who did the cooking throughout history.
The visual imagery is obvious, the 'V' formation and all the place setings, through flowers, or embroidery, all ellude to female genitalia, which bought Chicago ridicule and criticism.
Nearly thirty years later, her work has been seen by around a million people, and is now on permanent display at the Brookly Museum of Art.

'Red Flag' was an iconic piece of feminist art. The 'self portrait' of Judy Chicago (from the waist down) shows her removing a bloody Tampax from her vagina. 'Vaginal Iconology', as Barbara Rose termed it, 'Red Flag' was part of the Woman House project which explores the experience of menstration, which is ultimately only experienced by women. This piece was produced as a photo-lithograph which elludes to "high art" thus giving permission to the piece. Lke her 'Dinner Party' it elludes to the presence of women, but also thier absence in art. Chicago saw it as an opportunity to give women the right to make art about being a woman. As Lisa Tickner states in her article 'Body Politics', art of women in the 1970's was about reclaiming their/womens bodies for themselves. Chicago, Tickner says, is exploring the dichtomony between the secrecy of menstration and its 'gauzy packaged denial on the other hand'. Chicago uses the work of Giorgia O'Keffe and Barbara Hepworth as evidence for the reoccurrance of the "centralized void" which is central to her work.






Gustav Klimt 1862-1918

Austrian painter and graphic artist. he was part of the Avant-Garde and influenced by Impressionism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

In 1897 with a group of friends he split from the establishment and formed the Vienna Sezession, who held independent avant-garde exhibitions.

His position as leader of the avant-garde was confirmed while he was working on a commission for the Vienna University. Reception was hostile, and it was branded pornographic, and he abandoned the piece.

He was deeply fascinated by the allure and beauty of womanhood, which he addresses in both his portraits and subject pictures. His figures are naturalistically painted, but he elludes to eroticism of the woman through decorative backgrounds and sensual painting. This is a common method to register the erotic without explicitly depicting it.

His work was particularly influential on Oscar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.

Edvard Munch

Barbara Hepworth

Judith Berstein

Balthus

Leonor Fini

Carolee Schneeman

Mieke Bal, 'Reading the Gaze: The Construction of Gender in Rembrandt'

Mieke Bals article is based around the idea of a relationship between viewer and object/subject. She analyses the gaze, and its relationship to the glance, and differentiates the two.

Through her study of Rembrandt, Bal considers the function of the 'internal localizer', the active agent within the art work which represents vision. She refes to the idea that in sending out a message, the sender assumes that there is somebody there to receive that message. In order for this message to be received and understood then the message has to be constitued in a common language.

The essay is concerned with establishing the differenc between the glance and the gaze. She differentiates the two by establishing that the gaze, as the opposite to the glance, is an active process of looking, where the viewer is aware of the act of looking and engages with the act of representation and a knowledge that what one sees is not an objective reality.

Nanette Salomon, 'The Venus Pudica: uncovering art histories 'hidden agendas' and pernicious pedigrees'

Initiated by Praxiteles, 4th Century BC Greek sculptor. It became the symbol of the vulnerable, yet sexualised female body, visible, yet hidden.

A copy of the Venus Pudica

The word Pudica, is etymologically linked to the word 'pudenda', meaning simultaneously shame and genitalia.

The female female figure is created as submissive and opposite to the dominant powerful man. The pose worked in 15-16th century Italian Renaissance Italy (and later) as a site of a mutual male mating ritual. I a socio-political state it allowed man to achieve an equality by adopting a common interest.

The homosexual erotics, which Salomon observes in Michelangelo's 'Dasvid' were stigmatized by the time of the Italian Renaissance. Homosexuality and art in the Italian Renaissance, was explored by James M Saslow in his book, 'Ganymede in the Renaissance', in which he considers the taboo of homosexuality and how artists constructed imagery which enabled them to express their feelings in 'secret'.
The 'Venus Pudica' as it became known, began to allow men to experience sexual eroticism together, triggered by a 'stigmaless' femal heterosexual image.

The Pudica serves men, it is a cultural indicator (this idea of the construction of the 'Woman' by culture is explored by Lisa Tickner in the 'Body Politic') and causal of ideology. It does nothing positive to women directly, it shows them as being imposed upon, whereas their counterpart, the male nude, stood for 'atheltic natural beauty'. The model of creation, Salomon says, is passed from genration to generation without ever being questioned.

A Greek Nude

Lisa Tickner, 'The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women artists since 1970'

In her article Lisa Tickner deals with the representation of the female body, with her study centred around the 'erotic'. According to her their are two types of representation, the 'realist and the 'fantasist' within erotic imagery. These images are frequently women alone, fetishized for the masculine observer primarily, although erotic imagery of the female is not exclusive to men alone, she says.

Her argument, and what is evident in a lot, if not the majority of masculine depictions of the female body, is that the female body becomes a 'recepticle' for 'male fantasies, and fears and repressed homosexuality', in Freudian terms. She uses works by Munch, Bellmer and Klimt, to back up her argument.
Hans Bellmer, La Poupee (The Doll), 1935

Realist representation shows the woman as an equal sexual prtner. These images of copulating couples, where produced by men, for men to fantasize over. The male spectator/other, in the image, can be identified with or even displaced by the spectator/owner in fantasy, thus placing themselves in the picture plane with the female. In 'coitus' the male stands for 'Everyman'.

This is the function of pornography, in that it enables the spectator/owner to posses the fetishized desirable. Another strand to this is the association with sexuality, and its androgynous sensualities. The duality of the 'female' body, seving both masculine and feminie roles, and expressions of anxiety and fear. Tickner says: "woman is the symbol of purity and transgression...she is not the expression of female experience, she is a mediating sign for the male (artist as male). Woman's body has been created through and in parallel with a patriarchal culture.

The female body is not for the benefit of the female, breasts, menstruation, ovaries, pregnancy, are all for the benefit of others. The authors juncture is that through the reclamation of the female body, the'colonized territory from the masculine fantasy', by females, can they achieve 'equality'. Thus she states that the 're-integrationof the female genitals in art is primarily political, and not aggressive. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro talk of the unconcious use of the 'centralized void', evident in the work of Hepworth and O'Keffe.

Judy chicago, 'Red Flag', 1971

Tickner paraphrases Betty Dobson who says that "women will not easily live in their bodies until they have learnt not to suppress its less 'feminine' physical processes" i.e; menstruation. The concealment of menstruation has invited the violation of the taboo.

The sign 'woman' has been emptied of its original content and refilled with maculine anxieties and desires, the reclamation of this body, by women, enables them to express the feminine through their personal connection with its unique bodily functions, thus repositioning the body not as a fetishized body, but as a lived in feminine body that is true, and not constructed through masculinities.