Currently,
female artists are still neglected and unrepresented within the arts. As
Gorilla Girls have stated, the number of female artists in museums are heavily
outnumbered by men even though they are just as important as men. Contemporary artists
that we’ve discussed in class have contributed much to the styles of art as
well as their respective roles within those subsections, including performance
arts, postmodernism, and modernism. Most of these styles consisted of a general
theme that pertained to their own femininity or feminism. As the art becomes
newer and current, the topics that these female artists cover societal issues
that are imposed against women, especially on how they are supposed to act as a
female. These artists emphasize the importance of female artists and their
contributions to not only art movements like postmodernism but also provide
experiences of a woman from the perspective of a female artist.
 |
| Shindy Sherman's Untitled #15 1977-1980 |
1. An artist that we discussed is the photographer Cindy
Sherman, born in New Jersey, 1954 during the rise of postmodernism. Her most
notable work during the postmodern era was the untitled film stills. The art
consisted of black and white photos of self portraits that depicted the many
facades or tropes of women in Hollywood movies. Such stereotypes of women were
a critique on the expectations and norms in modern society. Sherman’s untitled
film stills is important to the postmodern movement because it reinforced the
ideologies of postmodernism, which was to really accept skepticism in its fullest
and question the norms of society. Sherman brought her own experiences as a
female through instilling the everyday stereotypes that she witnessed in
society as well as movies. Though these movies that she staged were not real,
it gave context on how truthful the stereotypes that women ought to fulfill was
perpetuated by the general culture. She
did not consider her works feminist at first but due to current times of the
acceptance or popularity of feminism, Sherman took on the role as a feminist
artist.
 |
| Shindy Sherman's Untitled #30 1977-1980 |
2. Judy Chicago, originally Judy Cohen, is an artist born in
Chicago, Illinois in 1939 that was first a minimalist artist but then shifted
her work towards feminism. The piece that was most prominent and iconic in her
career was The Dinner Party. In this
artwork, the major theme was feminism. Chicago’s main goal was to illuminate
the unrepresented women that contributed to society through science and the
arts, as well as important women figures that influenced history. This artwork
was monumental to the feminist movement regarding art as it was controversial
in court being vulgar when it was calling for representation of women. Because
people were trying to censor the vulva imagery that the place settings depicted,
it helped the agenda of the art, which was to push for awareness of
underrepresentation of women in history. Each setting was also unique in that
it described the woman’s achievements and contributions along with their field,
for an example, Ethel Smyth was a female composer that was subjected to double
standards regarding her art, either too feminine or not fitting for the
standard of music that her male counterparts were producing. Her place setting
was a plate that looked like a piano to depict her profession and the jean like
cloth, embroidered with pockets seemed to represent her experience trying to
enter the profession as a female composer as well as her sexuality, as she was
lesbian. She also won an award for composing, called the Dame Commander of the
Order of the British Empire.
 |
| Dinner Party By Judy Chicago 1979 |
3. Marina Abramovic is an influential artist today in which
she specializes in performance art, where most of her iconic routines were made
and popularized. The contributions that Abramovic made towards performance art
has considered her one of the pioneers of the modern-day performance art,
specifically focusing in on “visceral
performance pieces that engaged her body as both subject and medium”[2].
Through this technique, it not only immersed the audience with the performance,
but also provided the audience and artist a mental and physical connection to
the art and themselves. A major piece that Abramovic did in 1973 was called
“Rhythm 10,” where she played Russian roulette with her fingers and a knife.
Once a cut was made, she tried to replicate the rhythm through a recorder and
did it again. This was her first works that was performed in front of an
audience and it followed this theme of testing the physical and mental
abilities of the body, which was one of motifs of Abramavic’s works. The
performance created a standard for performance art where importance was set on
the imagery that performance art could provide as an art.
 |
| Marina Abramovic, "Rhythm 10", 1973 |
4. Yoko Ono, born in Japan, 1933, is a distinguished
multimedia artist and musician that has contributed much to the art industry in
terms of experimental art. One of her famous pieces in performance art,
“Cutpiece,” which was done in 1964, where she allowed audience members to come
up to the stage and cut her clothes with scissors, was a good example of
performance art. It was experimental as it was daring in a way to let strangers
handle your image, which was a sort of commentary on feminism and the female
self as well as the bond between audience and artist to create art. Her art
also featured themes of Dada where one of her pieces was a book called
‘Grapefruit’ with instructions on creating music and art, which was farfetched
for art, but it further explored what art could and can be.
 |
| Ceiling Painting By Yoko Ono 1966 |
5. Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, NJ, 1945 and is a
conceptual artist and collagist. Her works are mainly of feminist agendas and
include a lot of female empowerment. The technique Kruger uses is putting text
on top of usually public and media driven pictures. Her art is usually placed
in public spaces where anyone can see it. It was important for the postmodern
movement because it engaged the audience with current societal issues including
the male gaze. Through bold and iconic text, Kruger expresses empowerment of
women through opposition, either against stereotypes that women are portrayed
as or common sexist conflicts in a woman’s daily life. What is important about
these texts is that they are universal for most women and it highlights the
underlying toxic relationship between males and females.
 |
| Don't Be a Jerk, Barbara Kruger 1996 |
Works cited
Chadwick,
Whitney. Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition. Thames & Hudson,
2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment