Gender/Sexuality Differences

This idea that the femininity or masculinity of a person is learned behavior instead of inherent in your natural being as a boy or girl in sex has bothered me from the moment we discussed it. After reading the article I am convinced that the idea of women having femininity only as learned behavior is actually just women still trying to fight society's view of women. They are trying to say that women can be whatever they want to be, that we can compete with males, we can be just as masculine and men can be just as feminine...and while this may be true in the learned behavior discussed in the article, we are essentially by sex, naturally more feminine or masculine by hormone secretions in our bodies. We are feminine because we are by sex girl, whether these feminists featured in the article like it or not. We have created this media rendered image of the perfect woman (like below)
to sell things to people because sex sells, especially if you are using a female to attract a male, because men are visually stimulated. Once this media image was born, it was too late to try to change society's view of women. No longer are women respected in society, and always will we be seen as an object. Always will we fall short as real women when compared to the images rendered in magazines, and as such we will always be trying to compensate and trying to bring back respect for ourselves. This quote by Martha Wilson supports this argument: "art-making is an identity-making process...I could generate a new self out of the absence that was left when my boyfriends' ideas, my teachers' and my parents' ideas were subtracted." Wilson is only just now discovering that she is not the object of others' ideals; she is just herself. What she calls her "new self" is actually the true self she is under the culturally painted surface. She and all these other mentioned feminist artists are trying to say that women deserve to be free of culture's views of them, but their comments through art are only serving to make women more the enemy of men instead of earning their respect. They are trying to be as powerful as men, and they aren't and never will be. Men are supposed to be the leaders, and women are supposed to respect the man. This is how a man feels love, and he returns that love to the woman, who needs the comfort and safety of that love. As more feminists create art like this, less respect for men is shown and fewer men love women because of it. In this pattern, women feel lost and unloved and try to compensate even more. In the end they are causing more problems than they think they are solving.

ADRIAN PIPER

I found this article interesting because I also keep a journal of my life throughout the years. I like to occasionally go back and read what happened during my life, read what lessons I learned, how my character grew, and how my experiences have ended up shaping who I am now. It always strikes me that the experiences that happen to me although technically unique, end up being the same story that everyone else also deals with. Everyone has the occasional fight with their parents, every person deals with the stress of friendships and romances going sour, and everyone has to learn how to balance their time among all the things they want or need to do. When I write this stuff in my journal, it feels like it is happening only to myself, but when I look back later, I compare my writings to the stories I've heard from friends, and suddenly the story isn't so unique any longer. We are all part of the same puzzle. Adrian Piper took this a step further of course, and rereads her experiences until they are so commonplace that she starts to wonder if they are from her life or someone else's. As she does this, she creates an alter ego that is so far from herself that she fears this alter ego will start having experiences of its own...it will become its own person. This is where I differ in opinion from the artist. While I think it is a good thing to look at yourself objectively as just another human and see that we are all similar in the end, there is no excuse for making yourself into a completely different person. This to me is the extreme, and can cause problems just like Roberta Breitmore did for Sherman. Sherman was so obsessed with Breitmore that some people thought she was schizophrenic. And who is to say she isn't? Artists often take things too far to the extreme and I think this is yet another instance of this. Is Piper an artist creating art or is Piper using art to find in herself that she is actually a cross dresser? That she actually wants or perhaps is deep down emotionally, a male? Is art helping her find that she is gay? Or did art make her gay?

The Woman As Object/Masquerade

A PIECE OF THE ACTION: IMAGES OF "WOMAN" INTHE PHOTOGRAPHY OF CINDY SHERMAN

After reading this article I can't help asking myself what femininity really is. Judith Williamson recognizes femininity as an identity, and something that has many faces, but she also mentions that Sherman's settings in her photos are part of what makes a character "feminine". So if it's the setting that makes the picture itself feminine, is the person behind the mask of the photo feminine? Or is femininity nothing more than a culture created manipulation of the female form? Is it now simply something to put on, like the author discusses putting on clothing in the morning? Is it nothing more than a face, a facade, an act? If we had never started using propaganda, television, or movies, would femininity as we know it still exist? Scientifically, we know that men are attracted by looks, and women are attracted by relationship and connection. Somewhere along the line I think someone decided to capitalize on this to make money through media, and once this happened women were made more and more into an object, until art pieces like Shermans were created to critique it. She is putting herself into these feminine settings, and acting the part of the woman as object, but showing through her series that there are many ways to act out the role of the woman in society. I like how she brings in the boyish poses as well as the sexy ones, because it seems to be a critique of the propaganda's manipulation of societal thinking, recreating the woman as a person acting out roles, not simply a sexual object for people to look at. She is saying there is more to the woman than the media represents. One quote I'd like to discuss from Williamson says that "what we construct from the surface of each picture is an interior, a mixture of emotions. Each setting, pose, and facial expression seems literally to express an almost immeasurable interior which is at once mysteriously deep, and totally impenetrable: a feminine identity. Obviously this is what acting is about, but the still images are like frozen moments of performance and so the sense of personality seems more trapped in the image itself."
"Obviously this is what acting is all about." How can Williamson toss this comment aside so flippantly? I wish she had gone into more detail, because I think this is key to discussing Sherman's work. In all of these roles, a part is being acted out, and that role is the role mapped out for us by the media. In addition, the photos are carefully constructed as the media would do, to make the woman seem feminine, when really she is just a person like any other person, acting a cultural role. When Williamson says "personality seems...trapped in the image" she is touching on how the idea of femininity as we have been shown is a facade found only in media, and only in art. I think what she was trying to follow was the idea that femininity is complex and unreachable, but what she was getting at was deeper than even she knew when she wrote the quote.

CINDY SHERMAN:UNTITLED

This article went much deeper into the exact reasons why women are objects, going into Freudian concepts and pschycological explanations, but ultimately, it all comes down to the same idea as what I already mentioned above. One quote that Rosalind Krauss included from Arthur Danto goes along with what I was saying in the other response: "Another form of myth consumption is to buy into the finished signified of the role, the 'character' but to see the multiplicity of these various forms of what [he] likes to call The Girl.....The Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker, in the mythic unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex...Each of the stills is about the Girl In Trouble, but in the aggragate they touch the myth we carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and the security that defines the human condition."
Essentially, Danto is saying that the piece is using the idea, or rather, the cultural object of women as object, to facilitate a message that actually applies to all humans, not just women. The "woman as object" is, in fact, nothing more than a cultural facade.
Later in the article, this idea once again comes up, this time mentioned by Krauss herself: "Rather stereotype-itself rebaptized as "masquerade," and here understood as a psychoanalytic term-is thought of as the phenomenon to which all women are submitted both inside and outside the representation, so that as far as femininity goes, there is nothing but costume. Representation itself-films, advertisements, novels, and so forth-would thus be part of a far more absolute set of mechanisms by which characters are constructed: constructed equally in life as in film, or rather, equally in film as in life. And in this logic woman is nothing but masquerade, nothing but image."
Here Krauss is recognizing a shift in culture; a shift that shows how women have become the object they were made in media. No longer are woman free to be people, because they have been made into a cultural object of femininity, which has been twisted into woman as the sexual object, or even, as is mentioned later in the article, the woman as lacking, or rather, the Freudian concept of the castrated, or unwhole unless seen as a fetish, which makes them whole again. Culture has so manipulated the idea of the woman, that we are continually put into roles every day, stuck acting out who we are instead of being who we are. We are either helpless and lost, or flaunting our bodies for attention. No longer are we seen as people with normal human thoughts and emotions. It is this cultural shift, I feel, that has so stripped women of confidence, making them desperate to be liked, and to be the perfect shape that they see in magazines, and makes men want women to be what they see in magazines and television, no longer accepting women as they are unless they become the fetish to them that they have come to accept as real.

Below is a picture I found illustrating the woman as nothing more than a cultural creation to sell in advertising:

"Who Will Stand for Freedom?"

So I did my first performance art project in downtown Milwaukee, and here are the pictures of it:

Self-Portraiture/Self-Other Dynamics

WHAT IS PERFORMANCE?

I like how Carlson uses so many different definitions of "performance" in general to show how complex and fluctuating the term "performance art" really is. One thing I had been a little confused about going into the reading was how daily life figured in to performance art, because to me, essentially everyone plays a part of someone else. We all act differently for different people, to the point where it almost seems that we lose our true selves. For instance, this project we are doing soon...several of the people I talked to wanted to make their performance piece a showing of their true personality. They seemed to think that they needed a project to hide behind to actually do what they felt was true to their personality. Carlson says that there is a difference between "doing and performing" which comes down to attitude, but I disagree. After reading her opinion, I feel more solid on my own. Carlson's point that some things are done without thought and therefore not considered performance, does not make sense to me personally. In our society, people put on faces so much that it becomes part of us. Any learned behavior we project without thought is just another sad indication that we are afraid to just be ourselves. The more we hide who we are in public, the more we forget who we are at home. The performance is always intentional, it just is used so much that it becomes second nature. Essentially, we are always acting for an audience, even if that audience is ourselves when we look in the mirror.

BENEATH THIS MASK ANOTHER MASK

I am interested in this idea of the photo as "death" that is represented by Jones in this chapter, especially in relation to self-portraiture. One thing I am interested in exploring is the difference between film and digital photography in relation to this topic. One quote Jones used really caught my eye: "the photograph is a screen, the site where subject and object, self and other, intertwine to produce intersubjective meaning." In a regular photo this might be true because it is an actual tangible piece of paper that is kind of like a physical remnant of a person, caught with light on photo paper and preserved. But digital photography seems different. You are not preserving anything but pixels, and the pixels are part of the compter, alive essentially, in the computer and on the web. Therefore, your picture in pixels is a more live representation than a photo in general is, and the issue of death is compromised. Also, regular photographs are expensive and painstaking, and each produced photo is a rememberance of a person that can be kept after their death, but digital is much easier to take and so many photos may exist that after the person dies you could practically animate them into a video, living and moving and active, keeping the person alive in pixels and in motion. Below I have uploaded a series of photos I took when I got my new camera and then posted the pics on facebook:

I have dozens of photo albums like this. My facebook is much like a daily photo diary. I am still frozen in time in the pictures, and the person watching is, though now viewing through a computer screen rather than a photo surface, still reanimating me as they view me, but since the photos are not a phyiscal remnant in which to be trapped, I feel these pictures are an alive and functioning version of me, almost near to live video of my life through the computer.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON

This article on Leeson's work I think brings to light an old idea that inventors invent new things because they see a need and try to find a way to fill that need. Leeson spent the better part of her life manipulating images because she obviously found it more meaningful than basic photography, and at the time there existed no way to manipulate images on a computer. Her early works had a sense of realness to them, in that the original images were physically touched and rendered by her own hands. There is a quality of inventiveness to her work in the beginning, especially with her use of paint. Each mixed media work started very basically with a photograph but the rest was made completely by her own hands as if she were a painter instead of a photographer. One example is the picture of Roberta below:

This can hardly be called photography, even though it does start off with a photo in the beginning. This is very similar to what we do in the digital age today...we start with a photo and then manipulate it into a piece of artwork that can hardly be called photography any longer. This prompts Glenn Kurtz to say, "Soon no one will be a photographer." Kurtz seems to feel a loss when he describes Leeson's work, because she moves into the digital works and loses her individuality as a mixed media artist. But I think that Kurtz is too married to Leeson's earlier works and I find this irritating as an artist. He may have liked her earlier works, but every artist has the right to change styles without saying they are less of an artist for doing so. Leeson at heart was always a mixed media artist, and now that the technology exists, her true self as a creator can be realized. I would think that this would be a freeing thing for Leeson and should make Kurtz excited at what she will come up with next. Granted, her cyborg photos were a little lacking in comparison to her original works:


but I find them interesting in that she is experimenting with computer art in ways that are completely new to her, and still managing to work within the new ideas and contexts. As for her strict photographic manipulations in the "Phantom Limb" series, I actually really liked her photography, even more than her original creations. Her originals seem chaotic and almost abstract, while these photos are straight to the point. I think the loss that Kurtz sees is their commercial value because they are all print and the themes are so obvious:
which is a dominant theme in commerical photography. But instead of criticizing her like Kurtz, I see her growing as an artist and I find her new avenues adventuresome and brave for someone so new to the technology. In her recent works, she is planning on doing a piece on Second Life:

In all, I think Kurtz is seeing a loss in Leeson's work because she has new technology available. When things are harder, one finds a way of doing what you need to do, even if the outcome is not what you see in your mind. It is only after the technology comes available that you are finally able to do what you've always wanted to do. This I believe is the case with Leeson, and her works will continue to evolve as she learns new technologies and factors them into her work. I find her adaptable and changing and this to me means artistic freedom and should not be criticized. Eventually I think we will find that Leeson will go back to a more physical relationship with her works, only because she will get bored of the new technology and will want to change it herself again.

WORKS CITED
http://www.lynnhershman.com/


ROBERTA BREITMORE

"ROBERTA represented part of me as surely as we all have within us an underside; a dark, shadowy anaemous cadaever that is the gnawing decay of our bodies, the sustaining growth of death that we try with pathetic illusion to camouflage. To me, she was my own flipped effigy; my physical reverse, my psychological fears."

I found this article disturbing, because it shows once again that "art" has a fine line inherently whithin it which many refuse to acknowledge. The term "art" has become so broad that just about anything one does can be seen as "art", especially when we are speaking of performance. In many pieces I've seen in the past, especially in video, filmmakers will reveal a side of themselves that is dark and sadistic or raunchy, and display this openly for the camera. In a sense, the term "art" gives them an avenue, an excuse if you will, to act out on desires and to test boundaries that no normal person should or would do. As long as there is a concept behind the work, the grotesque is allowed to happen. It's gotten so ridiculous that I wouldn't be surprised if some day somebody decided killing was art, and they openly display murder in a gallery or on film. Technically this is against the law, but what if we were to go a little more grey area and I were to say, as an artist, that I thought abortion was a type of art? What if I were to take a small camera, since the technology exists, and insert the camera into the womb to record the death of an innocent child? Now what if I were to display this in a gallery as an installation piece that reacts to movement of the gellery goers (since that technology also exists now) and each time a person walks by, the baby gets killed? Am I an artist, or a sadist? Am I both? Am I to be considered an artist at all?

"For years my daughter denied she was related to me. People assumed I was schizophenic."

This is a very disturbing quote by the artist, because it shows manipulation of the mind. The mind is very inflencial on the spirit, and we must guard what we do with it or it can affect us forever. People assumed she was schizophrenic? I'd say she was! Or if she wasn't, she was adjusting her mind into the state which eventually she might be clinically considered to be schizophrenic! She was taking her "art" into the realm of mind manipulation, like her brain was the canvas, and suddenly "art" has crossed the line and become destructive. Her ealier quote:

"ROBERTA represented part of me as surely as we all have within us an underside; a dark, shadowy anaemous cadaever that is the gnawing decay of our bodies, the sustaining growth of death that we try with pathetic illusion to camouflage. To me, she was my own flipped effigy; my physical reverse, my psychological fears."

is not talking about an "alter ego"; she's talking about the flesh, the Satanic influence that all of us have inside of ourselves when we are not saved by Jesus Christ. By allowing herself to embrace this flesh side of her soul, she is injuring herself more and more and leading herself further and further into that flesh, or as she puts it, her "alter ego." The more she encourages this behavior, the more schizo she'll become and the more fearful and depressed she will be.