Feminist Consciousness-Raising in Art

Consciousness Raising was a method pioneered by feminist activists and feminist artists during the late 1960s (1967-68) which was used to highlight women’s second class status within western patriarchal society. Consciousness-raising was an anti-essentialist movement against generalisations involving women and restrictive ideas of “femaleness”.

Prior to feminist movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, western societies such as North America and Australia were dictated by patriarchal doctrine which advocated the notion that “femaleness” and femininity were inherently biological traits. Furthermore, these female characteristics were considered to be naturally occurring traits found in all women. Some extreme opinions considered women who were not “feminine” as psychologically unstable.

There were traits that were considered to be particularly feminine. These included ideas regarding woman as nurturer, woman as gentile, woman as care-taker as well as traits such as agreeableness, delicacy, being softly-spoken and possessing an unquestioning attitude towards male authority (particularly towards husbands).

Consciousness raising groups involved women meeting in private together without any supervision or interference from men. Only women were permitted in these meetings. Each woman would address the usually intimately-sized group about issues in her life such as feelings regarding motherhood, being a wife, jobs, unequal pay in the workplace, sexual harassment and sexism. Once they studied and investigated their own lives individually they began to realise that social attitudes and behaviours that left them feeling isolated and upset were often common oppressions.
Consciousness raising sessions began to make women feel confident about expressing their annoyance, anger, confusion and frustration about the general condition of women within western patriarchal society.

Judy Chicago was a feminist artist who was teaching in North America during the early 1970s. She first started teaching at Fresno State College in California. She pioneered the first Feminist Art Program in North America at Fresno State College in 1970. Chicago advocated consciousness-raising in her class so that her students could discover content that could be conveyed and highlighted within their art works. Through these consciousness-raising sessions she began to reveal women’s hidden histories.

She was attempting to organise an art community of women who would develop and work with feminist theories and practices in order to produce art works which were based on their common experiences in their male-dominated western society.
Prior to this Feminist Art Program, female students had primarily had male teachers and mentors who often dismissed them and primarily mentored their male students in the belief that women would not pursue a career and would instead have families. Chicago wished to provide female students with the support and encouragement that they had previously been denied.

After Chicago and her students had discovered ways in which they had been conditioned and formed on the basis of gender and revealed various personal experiences that were actually common oppressions, they expressed their oppression via any medium or mixture(s) of media including performance art, role-playing, conceptual and text-based art as well as other non-traditional methods to create feminist art. Chicago consciously used art forms which had not already had art histories established by male art historians and critics who created linear histories using male artists. She wanted to use art forms which were yet to have their place in art history established.

My next entry will continue from here and investigate the effect that female artists and feminist artists had on the art world particularly during the 1970s.

Performance Art: The Next Generation

http://perezhilton.com/2009-04-08-back-by-popular-demand

Lydia Ashe: following in Slinkachu's little footsteps...in Australia

http://lashe.wordpress.com/

Little People - Slinkachu, London, UK

http://little-people.blogspot.com/

Just For Fun

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/glance/785747/man-replaces-finger-with-usb-stick

Andy Warhol - The Guess Handbag of the Art World

Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) is an obvious and primary example of what happens when the individual artist surpasses the importance and fame of the art movement. While he was a central part of the Pop Art Movement his works came to be used to symbolise popular culture in a more general sense.

Andy Warhol fantasised about becoming wealthy one day. Very wealthy. It is said that he “wanted to walk down the street and hear someone whisper, ‘There goes the richest person in the world’”. Warhol was intrigued by wealth, luxury, the elite, social power and influence and fame.

During the early-mid 1950s Warhol was involved in producing commercial art, creating illustrations of women’s shoes for the I.Miller shoe company. These images were published frequently in fashion page ads. He said that he “loved working when [he] worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they’d say yes or no”. The process involved in his commercial works can be seen as foreshadowing his future practices of appropriating preconceived and recognisable imagery in his art. Instead of creating unique imagery from scratch, Warhol adjusted and “corrected” images that he eventually called his own.

A number of his artworks, starting from 1960, began to appear like commercial illustrations rather than anything that would have been considered under the guise of ‘fine art’. Large Coca-Cola (1960), Coca-Cola (1960) and 210 Coca-Cola Bottles (1962) are examples of his emerging methodologies which relied on the appropriation of popular and familiar imagery that arguably commented on advertising, marketing and mass consumerism and mass production as experienced within modern American society. Warhol utilised images of products and brand names that were easily recognisable within North American households, such as Coke and Campbell’s soup.

During this time (the early 1960s) Pop art began to appear in the general press, not just the art press. With the attention of the mass media Warhol consciously began to develop an appropriate “Pop culture” persona. He adopted the persona of a teenager who was fully immersed within and influenced by popular magazines, advertising, popular music and fashion. He employed basic mannerisms and utilised a vernacular that was typical of the younger popular culture (this included describing this as either “terrific”, “fantastic” or “wow”).

The straightforward appearance of Warhol’s images, which were often presented in repetitive grid patterns, meant that the subject matter was easily accessible and a wide variety of people were able to feel confident about commenting on his works as his subject matter was already familiar to them.

Throughout his career his artworks continued to resemble commercial illustrations as opposed to any traditional form of fine art. This is also true in regard to his portraits of famous actors such as Marilyn Monroe (Six Marilyns (Marilyn six-pack) (1962) and Elizabeth Taylor. He took the image of famous people and used them in his works as he did with coke bottles and Campbell’s soup cans, manipulating and correcting the image to produce a final work.

Warhol’s practices (perhaps unwittingly) took art to a place of aesthetic meaninglessness. Through mass reproductions of already familiar imagery and products, he attempted to render irrelevant the art world’s previous attention to subject matter and imagery in art. While issues related to the modernisation of Western society including mass production and mass consumption may be seen to be highlighted within some of his works, the mass reproduction of his own works and over-exposure of his most famous pieces (think Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, coke bottles and soup cans) have turned his artistic statements into crude and tacky visual representations of popular culture.

For a large majority of people his works are no longer associated with theoretical art processes or the voice of the artist. His images have become pretty aesthetic pieces for teenagers to cover their school books in or even decorate their Facebook and Myspace profiles with. I dare to say that some of these people may be unable to identify Warhol as the artist who created the images that they find so attractive. His images became popular for this type of use as they are associated with wealthy, recognisable and popular people and brands who/that are admired for reasons of beauty, fame, social power and influence. While Warhol’s use of the screen-printing process allowed for multiple copies of his works to be created that all appeared essentially identical, digital reproductions of his works have allowed for an even more extensive and uncontrolled distribution of his images. Andy Warhol’s works have widely lost their artistic theoretical meanings and have become the Guess handbags of the art world – widely accessible and visible, yet ultimately tacky by-products of contemporary popular culture.

(All quotes taken from: David Bourdon, Warhol, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1989.)

Art News Blog

http://www.artnewsblog.com/

Lyndal Jones - The Avoca Project (2008 - )

http://www.avocaproject.org/


Lyndal Jones is a Sydney-born artist who began experimenting professionally with performance art (from a visual arts basis) during the late 1970s starting with her At Home series (1977 - 1980, 5 solo performances). Within her performances she combined feminist influences with poststructural concepts and practices. Thus her performances were typically fragmented and disjointed in regard to their overall structure and narrative.
Jones critically analysed aspects of patriarchal culture from a feminist informed perspective. She dismissed patriarchal authority by representing woman as subject who was able to manipulate materials and images and express ideas. Thus she presented concepts and images of women who were alert, analytical and non-passive possessors of power and knowledge.
By the mid-1980s Jones's feminist ideologies demonstrated characteristically 1980s attitudes and beliefs, advocating an intellectualised and theoretically-based feminist practice. She created performances which served as critiques of 1970s feminism, rejecting the idea of exclusively female content in art while asserting the social construction of gender.
Lyndal Jones focused predominantly on performance art and performative visual arts practices through until the 2000s. From the 2000s, Jones began to engage with film and sound, creating a number of video projections with sound. Her videos still often included performative aspects. In her Crying Man (2003) interactive video installation she attributed male refusal to express certain emotions to socially constructed notions of gender appropriate public behaviour. When audience members walked close enough to the projection screen which showed the man crying, a sensor caused him to appear as if he was aware of being watched. The video then switched to one of him appearing embarrased and self-conscious.
From 2008 Lyndal Jones has been attempting a large environmentally-based community art project entitled the Avoca Project. The project attempts to highlight climate change from a visual arts perspective. The artwork is a large house located on property in Victoria. The house, the rooms of the house and parts of the surrounding landscape will be the sites of various art installations. The Avoca Project is a very unique Australian-based art project, the results of which will establish a new direction for art production both locally and internationally. The Avoca Project is definitely one to keep an eye on.

art:women - group exhibition 11 Feb – 28 Feb 2009, Benedict House, Queanbeyan.

http://www.benedicthouse.com.au/arthouse

The exhibition art:women was described by the organisers as “exploring notions of the depiction of women in art, representations of women, exploring ideas about gender, body, sex and the female form”.
This ambitious sentence attempts to address decades of feminist intuitive and intellectual exploration in the visual and performing arts. Consequently I became very nervous about the exhibition content I was about to experience.
Upon first inspection most of the works appeared to visually appropriate 1970s feminist art practices which relied heavily on the depiction of women and the domestic and private aspects of women’s lives as experienced within western patriarchal society.
I then became anxious that these artists would be open to the criticisms that were typical of 1980s feminist artists. That is, I was concerned that these artists would be accused of helping to objectify and stereotype women as the majority of 1970s feminist artists had been. However if one spends time considering the works and the intellectual thought processes of the artists then it is clear that most are actively creating feminist influenced works that have contemporary relevance and theoretical and intellectual importance.
Both Catherine Bennetts-Cash and Lydia Ashe showed works in this exhibition that demonstrated strong aesthetic and technical ability as well as individualistic intellectual explorations regarding aspects of the female experience and domesticity. Their aesthetic and theoretical investigations aid in creating and establishing potential options for the continued development of contemporary feminist art practices. Since the 1990s which was dominated by feminist explorations into sexuality and the areas of grey that exist between the modernist binary of female/male, feminist influenced artists have had little coherence or direction as a visual arts movement. (Jill Orr’s performance Marriage of the Bride to Art, 1994, is an example of Australian feminist influenced artists addressing issues of sexuality and androgyny during the 1990s).
Both Bennetts-Cash and Ashe conduct their feminist analyses from a psychological perspective. They address various psychological and cognitive anxieties that may be experienced by women in response to modern expectations of women that exist within a western society that has remained largely patriarchal. They both combine these expectations and anxieties with concepts of the modern domestic space. These artists have created works which represent a convergence of anxiety-ridden psychological spaces, the contemporary female experience and domesticity. The themes that are addressed in their works represent a coherence of feminist analysis that has historically proven to be rare in the visual arts.
While their artistic explorations are undeniably unique, the focus on psychological conditions unites their artistic practices. This focus on psychological anxieties as experienced by contemporary women in relation to the domestic in their feminist social analyses establishes a precedent that is relevant to contemporary society and which other feminist influenced visual and performing artists may take influence from.