1. Why is photography an appropriate medium for a feminist statement?
It gives the audience an ultimate insight into the world of a female during the time portrayed. It shows the clothing worn, the position they are stood in and the facial expressions they wear. It shows things as they are without too much distortion. For example in Tracy Moffet’s artwork “useless,1974” the artwork shows a woman wearing 70’s style clothing, stood in a sort of dominated nature , washing the lights of a car while wearing quite a resentful face. Accompanied by the caption “ Her father’s name for her was ‘useless’ ” we are able to see a woman in a period of great feminine oppression, forced to wash a car for a man who considers her to be useless. This kind of irony shows the insignificance thought to be surrounding women during this time.
2. What comments does sherman make about contemporary culture?
I believe Cindy Sherman through many of her artworks attempts to reveal the idea that our praised western society holds an extremely straight and boring view of what is considered beautiful. This is shown through the act of dressing herself up to appear profoundly different in each piece, often made to appear disturbing or uncomfortable . One could also say that this
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She often seems to make the comment that previous artists in western art history took the figure of humans too seriously. She also makes the comment that the view of beauty when some paintings were painted was quite different to the view of beauty now. For example shermans piece ‘untitled 216#’ is a re-interpretation of jean fouquet’s ‘virgin and child melun dipytch’ 1450. Looking at both artworks we can see the difference between the view of beauty during the time of Fouquet and the view of beauty during the time of sherman. Perhaps there is is also a comment of realism made by Sherman as fouquet’s figure is a fairly unrealistic depiction of a
With the photographs she takes of herself, she impersonates various characters and shows us the numerous roles women play in our world. In her pictures she depicts women as housewife, sex symbol, lover, victim, monster and more, and causes us to reflect upon how we perceive women.
Entering World War 1 was a very important decision for the United States that greatly affected its outcome. Two things stand out as the main reasons for entering the war. Firstly, was Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare. Secondly, was the UK’s interception of the Zimmerman Telegram.
Women often appear with glamorous image on advertisements, movies. However, there are also a lot of pictures to make women soured and routine such as women in the party, velvet erotic games, etc. By taking advantage of beautiful pictures, sexy women in the media seems to make the value of women become simply. People have acknowledging that women typically only have to dep, sexy, attractive, and space for recreation. Indeed, they hardly enhance the value of women. I am really shocked to find that most of social media is making people less interested in the intelligence, curved bar, and a lot of good things that women had not simply outward beauty. The media just give people that the public wants to. The film really makes the viewer think about the true value of women in the media and society. In addition, the film effectively appeals to the audience’s emotions and empathy. Throughout the film, the writer mentions her unborn daughter and her fear of whether her daughter “could grow up to be emotionally healthy and fulfilled given our moder culture.” She mentions that becoming pregnant and discovering her child was a girl is the reason she started looking to make a change in the way society and media sees women. This is an appeal to anyone who has a daughter or wants to have a daughter. They hope that people will want to make changes, just like the narrator did, for the future of the
In fact, most of them are unidentified and the reader may not identify a specific person that speaks in the different chapters. Thus, the audience may understand it is an embodiment of females focusing on structuring the major theme of the book, which is gender inequality. Additionally, the description of the female characters is equivocal such that the reader has to picture the image of the women. Although the author provides various photos in the book, there is absence of an explanation. Before this, the writer only concentrates on telling the story (Kim,165). Additionally, the author uses poetic approach to explain the setting in the book, which gives the novel distinct styles of writing. In fact, the poems are only meant to provide the reader with a description of the mothers and daughters, and this creates a distinction in the narrative. Resultantly, the audience perceives that when a poem appears in the reading, the author is probably narrating the plight of women. Notwithstanding, the novel uses visual art technique to communicate to the audience. in many instances, the author does not provide a description of an individual such that the reader has to imagine the person. In doing so, the readers are in suspense but the author offers a drawing that may be used to demystify the situation. in support of this style, it is apparent that the visual art may have
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.
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'.
Mary Cassatt is known world-wide for her impressing art in which she focuses mainly in the everyday life of women and children. She is an American artist born in Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844, but later relocates to Europe in 1866 to pursue to work in art. This was mainly due to her family’s and society’s objections to women in the field of art. There she met and befriended famous Impressionist Edgar Degas. Because of her close friendship with Degas, she grew courage to continue to do art in her own way. She continued to paint until she slowly began to lose her eyesight and later died in 1926. Cassatt was part of the Impressionist style movement, in which she painted portraits unlike many others who painted landscapes (biography.com). Her artwork
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
Cindy Sherman the American photographer is known as the queen of the self because of her self-portraits and her extravagant dresses.
Draw on the concepts you have studied in block 1, critically reflect on the ways in which your own life course has affected how you work in or use health and social care.
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
The women of the story are not treated with the respect, which reflects their social standings. The first image of the women that the reader gets is a typical housewife. They are imaged as “wearing faded house dresses and
It’s difficult to envision a world where idealized female imagery is not plastered everywhere, but our present circumstance is a relatively new occurrence. Before the mass media existed, our ideas of beauty were restricted to our own communities. Until the introduction of photography in 1839, people were not exposed to real-life images of faces and bodies. Most people did not even own mirrors. Today, however, we are more obsessed with our appearance than ever before. But the concern about appearance is quite normal and understandable given society’s standards. According to Jane Kilborne, “Every period of history has had its own standards of what is and is not beautiful, and every contemporary society has its own distinctive concept of the
(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
In 1971, Linda Nochlin issued her article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? This idea of aesthetic genius, says Nochlin, is fiction. Art is rarely produced entirely by the artist for the idea of personal expression. Few identifiers in contemporary art have been as fraught as the term feminist art. What does it mean, who defines it, and how does it relate to past accomplishments of the feminist movement?