Tag: female gaze

Tereza Cervenova – [↖] Untitled from See Through series (2014); [↗] Untitled from Verse series (2014); [↙] Untitled from Verse series (2014); [↘] Untitled from See Through series (2014)

One need not be especially observant to notice that the art historical depiction of women has been inherently sexist.

It’s at least partly a question of representation. History–being written by the victorious (namely: white cishet men)–necessarily reflects its authors.

Throughout history there have always been women artists. But as the quip goes: Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and wearing heels.* In other words: women have to do twice as much equal to their male peers to be considered by history as half as meritorious.

(As the art terrorists/activists Guerrilla Girls have pointed out: representation of women artists in targeted galleries was only 10% in 1985–just shy of 30 years later, representation has doubled but still is only a paltry 20%).

But not only is the art that has been deemed canonical decidedly authored by men, it’s also produced primarily for the consumption of white, cishet men–a fact so blatantly obvious it seems innocuous.

John Berger famously called this out in his seminal Ways of Seeing, when he took the rote objectification in art history to task–which he referred to as the male gaze. (Although limited to the tradition surrounding the female nude as a subject of Art, his criticism can and should be applied broadly and often to any and all means of plastic visual representation.)

Recently, there has been a trend of young women photographers and image makers whose work has been deemed an active and sustained subversive attack on the tradition surrounding the male gaze. Typically, this is referred to–knee-jerkishly–as ‘the female gaze’.

I’m using scare quotes very specifically here. I’ve taken issue with the term in a handful of previous posts. But I am going to resist the urge to repeat myself beyond saying that I think it could apply to the work of several artists, including Cervenova.

Yet, I suspect that like the other artists where I don’t feel it’s pretentious or arrogant for the artist to deploy such a term, I’d wager that Cervenova would be hesitant to embrace the term as applicable to her own work.

That’s noble enough–but here I think it lends a certain prescience to the work. Cervenova favors vertical orientation. I don’t think accusations of #skinnyframebullshit necessarily fit. (Yes, I’m not sure I’d choose to frame things in this fashion and given a sort of familiarity with landscape vs portrait orientation and the grammar surrounding each, her work doesn’t follow ‘the rules’ but is actually surprisingly consistent. Also, I’m fond of the way self-conscious cropping figures into her framing decisions.)

But rejecting the portrait vs landscape framework hardly makes work worthy of being subversive. What’s so intriguing about Cervenova’s work is the way the frame informs or parses the space the viewer is shown. There’s something solid about it. An authoritative flourish. The act of seeing as a type of intimate sharing.

I keep coming back to that Ginger Rogers line because here are elements in Cervenova’s work that are not unlike say Paul Barbera. Both have a similar interest in using light against type. But I feel like Barbera uses the short hand developed to goose the male gaze while Cervenova pushes things in a more experiential direction–by offering the viewer glimpses of fleeting mementos in limited and contained context. I won’t argue that her work is better but she is taking risks that many established male photographers have never been forced to because they can be safe and respected.

*It’s been pointed out to me that this Astaire/Rogers quip is, at best, myopic.

Source: terezacervenova.com

Harley Weir – [←] Agata for Baron Magazine (2014); [→] Greta Varlese for Self Service (2015)

I was not especially fond of Weir’s work, initially–it came across as frivolous, trite even.

Over the last year, my thinking on the matter has shifted; the mechanism of that shift was not solely motivated by the maturing of the work so much as the way that Weir has slowly but steadily improved by increment.

That’s an unusual progression to witness. Usually, you have someone who is making good work who disappears for a bit and then explodes back onto the scene with some skull cleaving next level shit. (Case in point: Jacs Fishburne, who has going from demonstrating obvious talent two years ago to sharing some fucking profoundly inspired and technically accomplished work.)

The sort of quantum leap tends to be the exception and not the rule. So it’s refreshing to see an artist to present such a public face to the false starts and failures that are informing behind the scenes growth in perspective and conceptual acuity.

It’s interesting to me that the now seemingly defunct Baron Magazine’s stated goal was something along the lines of exploring the space between pornography and art.

Overlooking the fact that there isn’t a proverbial no man’s land separating art from pornography, so much as a venn diagram overlapping, It’s interesting to see the image of Agata in that context. Why? Well, although she is nude, she is turned away from the camera (ostensibly also from the viewer). She’s undressing but in a way that is both sexy and awkward–she seems restrained by her clothing, in a way. There’s also the lurid 70s porn palate, super saturated red, pale rose and washed out blues. The phone on the wall, although distracting is a really nice touch that ends up selling the image.

In the second image, things on the surface appear simpler: a model in a fashionable sweater and tartan print skirt. The ¾ profile of the first image is shifted to 7/8 back to camera. The frame lines are tighter–below the eyes and mid-thigh. It’s obvious that Greta is positioned in front of one of those slightly marbled photo paper backdrops. The clumsily presented clothing as physical restriction theme is revisited… only this time the clothing is presented as something almost interchangeable with high end bondage gear. The positioning of her hands hikes up her skirt revealing a centimeter less of the cleft between her legs than would be pornographic.

With so many young women making work on the fringes of fashion and erotica, there’s a lot of talk about developing a female gaze to counter Berger’s art historical male gaze. I’m highly critical of this trend–mainly because the people who are most emphatic about claiming it really do very little in their work to justify their claims. But I think the key difference between the above images is the former is made–probably unintentionally–to cater to the male gaze. The latter won’t necessarily fail to appeal to the male gaze so much as to see it as erotic (and I would argue it’s actually far more erotic in concept and execution than the former is) requires a certain acculturation in an experience of visual culture that is decidedly feminine.

Source: harleyweir