Cindy Sherman And Jenny Holzer: The Feminist Art Movement

For my term paper I decided to go to the Cantor Museum in Palo Alto, and I chose to focus on two portraits of women from two distinct time periods. First, I decided on the portrait of Margaret Blagge, Wife of Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin. This portrait was painted by the artist Matthew Dixon in 1675, in the Baroque period of art. The portrait of Margaret Blagge was done in England, and it was painted as an oil on canvas. The second artwork I chose to compare was the Portrait of Sally Fairchild by John Singer Sargent. This portrait was done from the year 1884 to 1887 during the Realism movement in art. The portrait of Sally Fairchild was painted in the United States of America, and was painted as an oil on canvas. When comparing these two portraits

Postmodern American artist’s Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker critique and question grand narratives of gender, race and class through their work and art practice. Cindy Sherman, born 1954, is well renowned for her conceptual portraits of female characters and personas that question the representation of women, gender identity and the true (or untrue) nature of photography (Hattenstone 2011). Kara Walker, born 1969, is known for her black silhouettes that dance across gallery walls and most recently her sugar sphinx, A Subtlety, address America’s racist slavery past (Berry 2003). These practitioners differ in their practical application of different mediums, Sherman constructs characters and scenes of stereotypical female personas in her photographs where she operates as the actress, director, wardrobe assistant, set designer and cameraman (Machester 2001). Simone Hatenstone, writer for The Guardian, states “She 's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we 've barely started.” (Hattenstone 2011).Whereas, Walker creates paper silhouettes that are installed into a gallery space, as writer Ian Berry describes,

Cindy Sherman, well known for her photography of her representing issues that commonly represent both the roles of being an artist, being a woman and the two combined. Sherman grew up in a large family that did not have any interest in art. Her knowledge of art growing up was very minimal until she went to college. She, then, started to paint. She quickly realized she did not like painting because of the lack of intimacy or recreation of a particular setting. She did, however love photography and started pursued an interest in that.

A single photo can tell thousands of stories about people that have been silenced in the past or those who are still silenced today. This is the case for the photograph titled “Oppression” by Luke Moore. In such a simple picture, the author is giving voice to the women who have been mistreated, killed, raped and oppressed. This treatment against women is not new and has been implemented all over the world. Moore uses line, character, and color to appropriately demonstrate the fight women have against oppression and the responsibility society has on this oppressive system.

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

Their eyes bore into the viewer in a nonverbal challenge. The faces of the early women’s rights activists are the only distinct images in the art work. They are the definite forms the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn toward. The black and white faces stand in sharp contrast to the colors that surround and engulf them—pink, red, blue, purple, green, yellow, orange. Arising from these seemingly purposelessly splashed colors, hands emerge from the white background, clasping, reaching toward Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Terror and mockery come together in the portraits of Cindy Sherman on display at the Crocker Art Museum. Walking into the large, dimly lit ballroom, one may begin to feel a slight sense of trepidation as the viewer looks around to find nine sets of beady eyes watching one’s every move. Sherman produced her History Portraits during the late eighties and early nineties, nine of which are displayed at the museum. In her portraits she uses lush fabrics, lavish jewelry, and false body parts to decorate herself in these self-portraits. Her portraits have been know to cause discomfort in the viewers who find the general stereotypes, depicted in her portraits, amusing, yet confusing and terrorizing.

Adopting a tongue-in-cheek tone, they list the so called ‘advantages’ faced by women artists in the 1980’s, such as “working without the pressure of success” and “knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty”. The Guerrilla Girls demonstrate their strategy of using humour and sarcasm to break down discrimination within the art industry through this artwork. It reflects how discrimination is experienced by all kinds of women, both within and outside the art industry. The poster highlights not only the difficulties of being recognised as a female artist, but also the difficulties of balancing a career and personal life in a society that undervalues women’s contribution. The Guerrilla Girls wanted female artists to recognise that they are not the only ones being discriminated against, women all over the world, not only artists, can identify with this. The public are confronted with the hard truth that it isn’t just women artist being targeted, but all women in the world are discriminated against, and it isn’t right. The audience are supposed to look at this piece and feel challenged. They are supposed to tell the Guerrilla Girls what they are writing is wrong, but they can’t, because what is said in this piece is what is really happening in their society. The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist is successful

Judy Chicago (artist, author, feminist and educator) has a career that now spans five decades. In the late 1960s, her inquiry into the history of women began a result of her desire to expose the truth of women’s experiences, both past and present. She still continues on a crusade to change the perception of women from our history, “Women’s history and women’s art need to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Chicago, 2011) Through our history women - their struggles, accomplishments and contribution to history, have been overlooked, downplayed and even completely written out of a male dominated society and culture. In anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” she supports this view, writing “…woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues,” (Ortner, 1974) Where Mendieta's work primarily came from a striving to belong and an understanding of where she came from, I feel that Chicago's aim was to find a place for all women, past and present in this world, starting with herself in the art world. Chicago did explore her peronal heritage in later works entitled 'Birth Project' and 'Holocaust Project'.

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

The Guerrilla Girls speak about sexism in art galleries and the non appreciation of women 's art in the most prestigious galleries of New York. “a very big problem is the fact women don 't collect. ... Men buy the art and call the shots museums. Until women support women and collect each things will never change" (Withers 287). Women artists new to the art world were not accepted, men artist bought their art to present as their own. This way women artist do not get the chance to be recognized for their talent. Making the assumption women are only valued as the model but cannot aspire to be artists and create exceptional work as men would. This is of importance because only 1% or none of the art presented was of women artists. “not only in their appeals to principles of equality, but also, say, in their gesture of adopting the names of deceased female artists as aliases, a gambit tacitly

Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity was written by Griselda Pollock in 1988, and later published in The Expanding Disclosure in 1992. Griselda Pollock is an art historian, and writes this article for fellow art historians. This is an article written to show the different approaches to femininity in the late 19th century, mainly dealing with the field of art. This article shows how during this time period there were women artists, but due to the gendered ruled ideas attached to art history, these women are largely ignored by art historians. Pollock thought that these women artists are primarily overlooked due to the fact that they are judged by the same standards that are affixed to the work of their male counterparts. But she argues

There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also

A review of the world’s great artists conjures familiar images: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy. There are many more, of course: Monet, Moya, Warhol, Rembrandt, Kandinsky. What is immediately noticeable, however, upon any brief study of art, is the significant absence of women as heralded artists—not only in our ancient pasts, but even today, amongst valiant efforts for gender equality.

(Millhouse, 2011) In the 1980’s Pollock’s Feminism “critiqued the essential myths of individualism, the artist, and the social constructions of femininity and masculinity that define bourgeois culture”. While the 70’s feminism movement aim was to stand next to the existing masculine dominated culture. “Feminism's encounter with the canon has been complexed and many-leveled: political ,ideology,mythological,methodological and psycho-symbolic” (Pollock, 1999). The 1970’s movement was followed by the immediate task which was “the need to rectify the gaps in historical knowledge created by the consistent omission of women of all cultures from the history of art” (Pollock, 1999). The only art that was put on display was significantly male dominated work, if you wanted to see work created by women, you would have to view them “in a basement or storeroom of a national gallery” (Pollock, 1999). Female artists are only known in their own category of female artists while male artists don’t require a separate category . Art that is created by females have been historically dismissed from the art historical canon as craft, as opposed to fine art. The evident of