Photojournal entitled “Unpretty”. Spoke of the life of drag queens and common misconceptions about them. I got to see how their life was through the various pictures and it communicated to me that these people live lives like this with a lot of hardship involved. I thought it gave me a glimpse of something that I’d never be able to see for myself especially in the Singaporean context. And the photojournal brought out several emotions in me while getting to know “Izzy”’s story. I also liked the way the creator included the lyrics of Britney Spear’s circus in his captions for the photos because the lyrics themselves provide the audience/readers with a clear direction of where the impression of this artwork is heading towards.
Next, was the “Cat Collar” exhibition. It was interesting how they made the map something like those of what the police would do while planning how to catch the criminals. It was a unique aesthetic to show the problem at hand and the fact that they had a product to capture the faces of the criminals that abuse cats was really cool. It got me thinking whether it’ll actually be a feasible product in future because it requires certain technology to be implanted into the eyes of the “victims” (the cats), and also certain circumstances may be disadvantageous for this product like what if the criminal decides to attack the cat from behind, then the cat’s eyes (camera) won’t be able to capture the image of the criminal’s face.
Next was the exhibit called “Revisioning” and I loved the concept of this series. It provided the audiences with 2 perspectives, one in red and one in blue and it was interactive because the audiences had to place either a red cellophane paper or a blue cellophane paper in front of the their eyes to be able to see the words or the drawings respectively.
A good GIF, and anything is GIF-able these days, captures just enough of a specific moment to illustrate emotion yet leaves enough out to spark your curiosity. It’s a beautiful balance of amusement and wonder.
Kelly Reemtsen is best known for her paintings of elaborately dressed women carrying household tools such as chainsaws or axes. Though they can be interpreted as variably sweet or menacing, the paintings investigate the role of the modern woman. Reemtsen's paintings are characterised by their thick impasto, stark white backgrounds and anonymous figures. Reemtsen's most recent body of work explores the idea of breaking the metaphorical glass ceiling, often featuring female figures climbing on objects like chairs or ladders.
Sarah Maple’s Disney Princesses series portrays princesses doing various jobs which have a pointed message about how the public perception of what women are “supposed” to do and how certain jobs are viewed.
“Snow White is a scientist. Sleeping Beauty is performing an operation, Jasmine is a judge, Cinderella has a seat in parliament, Belle is a football manager and Ariel is conducting a business meeting. It’s funny because people call them Disney princesses doing male jobs – they just assume those are male jobs. I never said that. To me, they’re empowering jobs,” she said.
A radical feminist and a well-known figure in the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, Linder is known for her montages, which often combined images taken from pornographic magazines with images from women's fashion and domestic magazines, particularly those of domestic appliances, making a point about the cultural expectations of women and the treatment of female body as a commodity.
Now seen as an iconic and path-breaking Feminist artist, Wilke's work was first rejected by many critics, largely because of her conventional beauty. Her performances and photography are now seen as a crucial component of the Feminist movement in their use of the artist's own body in ways that addressed issues of female objectification, the male gaze, female agency, and even sexism within the feminist movement itself. Her challenge to traditional art practices and cultural assumptions puts her work squarely within postmodernism, while her fearless exploration of the female body keeps her relevant to this day.
Wilke relentlessly explored stereotypes of the female body by drawing attention to the objectification of women in both high art and popular culture. Her use of her own body put her practice at the cutting edge of performance art, but her work in this genre was often misread by critics as a celebration of her own beauty and thus a reaffirmation of women's objectification.
Wilke employed a wide range of media; her experiments with non-art materials were not unusual for the time, but her chosen media were ephemeral and playful, including gum, erasers, chocolate, play-doh, cookie dough, and dryer lint. The common denominator in these materials is their malleability, something she used to express both stereotypes about women and women's vulnerability.
Her quotes:
"Why should we have this mind-body male-female duality? The mind and body are one, so I tried to make art an expression of that connection."
Some artworks:
Title: Advertisement for an Exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (1970)
The photograph depicts Wilke in her studio in Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, wearing a sweater, high-heeled boots, and thin hosiery. She is shown from behind with one leg planted firmly on the ground, while the other foot rests on a chair. Her position looks neither natural nor comfortable, and the effect is deliberately sexualized and confrontational.
The image is complex and contradictory. It shows Wilke with her back to the viewer as if she is working hard on her art, taking her practice seriously. However, while it presents a woman-as-artist, it also presents a woman-as-object. As Amelia Jones puts it, "she is absorbed in something on her desk and her defiance is marked by her ass-in-your-face pose and her seemingly complete lack of interest in or concern for the viewer's potentially devastating 'male gaze'."
Wilke's absorption appears to give the (implicitly male) viewer uninhibited access to this highly sexualized image of her.
Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. — Starification Object Series
Wilke posed à la pinup style — often topless — with tiny folds of bubble gum covering her body like blemishes, made to look like miniature vulvas for her S.O.S. — Starification Object Series. (The forms were reminiscent of her famed 1960’s vulva sculpture works.) Ironically enough, Wilke often found herself defending the photographs, as many suggested it was her beauty that made them most compelling.
“I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman — chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out, and pop in a new piece.”
In 1985, a group of vigilantes wearing gorilla masks took to the streets. Armed with wheat paste and posters, the Guerrilla Girls, as they called themselves, set out to shame the art world for its underrepresentation of women artists. Their posters, in the words of one critic, "were rude; they named names and they printed statistics. They embarrassed people. In other words, they worked." In addition to posters (now highly valued works of art), billboards, performances, protests, lectures, installations, and limited-edition prints make up the Guerrilla Girls' varied oeuvre.
Some quotes:
"If you're in a situation where you're a little afraid to speak up, put a mask on. You won't believe what comes out of your mouth."
"We'd love to take those masks off, but would anyone listen to us without them? We discovered that the art world takes feminists more seriously when they use humour and wear a gorilla disguise. Pathetic! We think of it as our masculinity."
"We use facts, humour and outrageous visuals to expose sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture."
“One of our goals is to reinvent the "f" word - feminism. Our message: find your own crazy, creative way to be a feminist and an activist."
Title: Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into Music Videos?
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