Feminist art and the Female Body Flashcards
Key Points
- 1970s - 1990s feminist artist’ challenges
- Reclaim the body
- Feminist artists working since the 1970s to the 1990s - sought to challenge dominant ways of making art.
- How feminist artists were seeking to challenge historical conventions around women’s bodies - by reclaiming the female body.
- The medium is important - what is it about performance art?
- Different feminist artists, had different uses of the body - Not only one way in which a feminist artist sought to reclaim the body.
‘Breaking Open the Boundaries’ and ‘Redrawing the Line’ in The female nude: art, obscenity and sexuality (1992) by Lynda Need
- The right for women
- Need argues that Feminist art in the 1970s articulated a right for women to represent their own bodies and sexual identities (one way to render visible actual bodies, showing subjects of taboo, subjects like blood)
- Artworks challenged anesthetisation and sanitation of the female body in history.
Risks of the Female Body as a Feminist Motif
- Voyeuristic traditions
- Works using the female body risk being re-appropriated back into a voyeuristic tradition that feminist artists were seeking to undermine.
‘Interior Scroll’ (1975) by Carolee Schneeman (1939-)
- Who is Carolee Schneeman?
- Description of her performance
Who? Carolee Schneeman is an American visual artists, known for her discourses of the body, sexuality and gender.
What? Still photograph of Schneemann’s performance. Her arms and legs are painted, as if she is the canvas. She adopted conventional life model poses and then pulled a scroll from her vagina and read it out. The words were about male criticism of her work as a woman. It is a live performance, she is active and the performing subject.
Risk: ‘Interior Scroll’ (1975) by Carolee Schneeman (1939-)
- Subverting the gaze
Throughout the performance she subverts the gaze as she is the live performer. What happens if it is just seen as a photograph? Does it risk becoming another static image of a female nude? Does it still have the subversive capacity if its watched on a video after (so when the viewing conditions are different)?
‘Red Flag’ (1971) by Judy Chicago (1939-)
- Who is Judy Chicago?
- Description of the artwork
- Importance of the lithograph
Who? Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture.
What? Tones of pink, grey and black lithograph of one female leg and the other hidden by a hand which is removing a reddened bloody tampon. Personal private act that has a dimension of taboo. Importance of the medium, lithographs are conventionally associated with high-art. The objective are women representing new kinds of subjects by using the conventional mediums of art historically. Emphasis on the interior of the body, Reveals and emphasises bodily traces and fluids. Considered to make a key contribution to freeing women from the taboo of mensuration.
Risk: ‘Red Flag’ (1971) by Judy Chicago (1939-)
-The representation of the body
Problem of the work, it doesn’t challenge the system of thought in which women are associated with their bodies, which may be a limitation to this work.
Both Works
- Challenges
- Challenges the idea of sealed idealised body, in both works its about the body as an actual living physical matter and also a process.
Last Key Point
- Reclaiming the female body
- Feminist art aimed to reclaim the female body but there were debates staged amongst feminists about the appropriateness of the female body as a feminist motif.
