Had it not been for this class, I personally would never
have become aware of the disadvantages women face in today’s society on the basis
of gender. Now, I try to recognize the same themes in the various artworks,
paintings, movies and even the people around us. It is almost as if I have
another decoding mechanism added to my brain and I have come to favor using it
often. Among females, artists faced many obstacles as they tried to express themselves
in their own ways and that is evident in the work of a few of those artists as
well and it is thanks to these artists that others have become informed about
the hardships women have to face even while they practice the rights they have
or should have. The artists I was interested in mentioning are those that sort
of question the role of the female in society through their artwork. They are
Artemisia Gentileschi, Barbara Kruger, Marina Abramovic, Wangechi Mutu, and Judy
Chicago.
Artemisia Gentileschi is one of the artists whose works I
personally favor due to the quality of her work. She was “a painter whose life
and work are a challenge to humanist constructions of feminine education and
deportment” (Chadwick, 105). Artemisia had a painful life in which she was
brutally raped and this had a big influence on her for the rest of her life. As
an aspiring artist, she brought forward questions about the male gaze, such as
in her recreation of Susanna and the Elders in 1610 that was made by Tintoretto
originally in 1555. Her painting was an absolute opposite of Tintoretto’s work
in that she made the male gaze a negative factor of the painting instead of
treating it lightly as Tintoretto did.
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| Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith with her Maidservant (1618) |
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| Artemesia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (1610) |
Artemisia’s father was also a painter and so she was saved
from the difficulties of learning to paint from someone else where she would
have been look down upon as was common in that time. Just as her recreation of
Susanna and the Elders, she also recreated in 1618 her father’s work from
1610-12 named Judith with her Maidservant which was based on a theme from the
Old Testament Apocrypha. In this painting her father had made Judith and the
maidservant seem a bit scared and nervous after killing Holofernes. Artemisia
however brought the women closer and made them look cunning and lacking any
possible empathy or fear. This seemed to be Artemisia’s style, where she pushed
the harsh realities of life from her perspective almost into the viewer’s face.
Despite the simplicity of the work, I was most fascinated by
Barbara Kruger’s work as she sought to accomplish the emphasis of how “language
manipulates and undermines the assumption of masculine control over language
and viewing” (Chadwick, 382). She was born in 1945 and kept on creating work in
the field she studied. She mainly used cropped photographs of women and put
text around it to give the photograph the meaning she intended for it rather
than the original meaning it may have held, what I favor about her work is that
she compelled her audience to think critically rather than just putting forward
her opinions.
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| Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981) |
Her work takes from many different themes that exist in
society as “much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism,
consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire” (barbarakruger.com). The text
Kruger puts forward is usually the meanings that are hidden in spoken words by
people or the language used by mainstream media. Many people tend to be aware
of these “implied” meanings but these are still pushed and discarded in the
back of their heads, leaving them vulnerable to outside influence by other
people or media. She is known for using mainly black and white images, sometimes
using red as well. Her work from 1981, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My
Face) is an example of her back and white images which she usually picked off
from mainstream magazines.
Marina Abramovic was one of the artists who, after experimenting
with various mediums of art such as painting and drawing, used their own body
as their medium. This particular field is known as performance art where the
artist communicates with the audience through their own body. For Marina, her
body was her subject as well. The difficulty of performance art is realized
when one considers how the artist has to communicate their message and how they
have to perform the same work for hours and exhaust their bodies off.
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| Marina Abramovic, The Artist Is Present (2010) |
Abramovic faced the same hardships in her work. For
instance, her performance named “The Artist Is Present (2010), where for three
months she spent eight to ten hours per day sitting motionless, engaged in
silent eye-contact with hundreds of strangers one by one” (Marina Abramovic Institute)
is proof enough of how much stressful it could possibly be for her to perform
like that. But apart from that, her work is inspiring to others as it shows
just how much determined she is to express the ideas she has. “Abramovic’s
primary concern is with creating works that ritualize the simple actions of
everyday life: standing, lying down, sitting, dreaming, and thinking. These
acts, when incorporated into long durational performance, manifest a unique
mental state in both her and the audience” (MAI). And this was the mental state
that she wanted her audience to remember through her performance. Through the
performances where she left action to her audience while becoming passive,
Abramovic also got the chance to witness the various mentalities of people as
while some people were harmless, others went as far as stripping her.
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| Wangechi Mutu, Root of All Eves (2010) |
Wangechi Mutu, one of the artists exhibited in the Brooklyn
Museum, is a Kenyan woman who uses many varying mediums for her work with the
most famous of them being her collages that depict female figures. As her
mediums, her subject also comprises of numerous areas of society, such as race,
gender, politics and others. The females in her collages are presented in
different forms simultaneously, they are “part human, animal, plant, and
machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and
alluring, defying easy categorization and identification” (Brooklyn Museum).
Her collage from 2010, named Root of All Eves puts forth one such combination in
which she goes over the image of women being thought of as evil and other
political factors that have contributed to the corruption of Africa.
Judy Chicago is another artist from the exhibition at
Brooklyn Museum who was an outspoken artist when it came to the suppression of
women. She was a part of the Feminist Movement and is best known for her
monumental work called The Dinner Party (1974-79). It comprises of a huge triangular
table that celebrates the work and significance of many women from history. “The
settings consist of [various decorations] with raised central motifs that are
based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the
individual women being honored” (Brooklyn Museum). The artwork is a permanent installment to the
museum.
Belonging to a Muslim culture, my previously held beliefs were that women in eastern cultures were the only ones exposed to the harsh realities of a patriarchal society. From the eastern point of view the women of the west get to do as they wish and aren’t constantly bound to the males in their family. But I realized how wrong I was as I read about the western female artists and discovered that oppression existed all over the world. It was just the form that differed, such as in the east women are restricted to not expose their body and are strictly bound to their social norms that dictate that they have to be in full clothing all the time. In comparison, the women of the west are encouraged to expose themselves more as they are perceived as an object by males. So how women should behave and appear is decided by their societies in both cases. I am glad that I am now able to look at things from yet another perspective.
Bibliography:
Barbarakruger.com.
Barbarakruger.com. n.d. Web. December 2, 2013. <http://www.barbarakruger.com/biography.shtml>.
Marinaabramovicinstitute.org.
Marina Abramovic Institute. N.d. Web. December 2, 2013. < <http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org/mai/mai/4>
"Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: The
Dinner Party." Brooklyn Museum:. N.p., n.d. Web. December 2, 2013. <http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/home.php>.
"Exhibitions." Brooklyn Museum:. N.p., n.d. Web. December
2, 2013.
<http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/wangechi_mutu/root_of_all_eves.php>
.
“Feminist Art – Barbara Kruger”. Arthistoryarchive.com.n.p.,n.d. Web. December 1, 2013. <http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Barbara-Kruger.html>.
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