Laura Callaghan

I may have previously discussed this on another post but I am constantly thinking about illustration and sexual agency.

It is very easy for self photography or performance to convey sexual agency as the artist can consent and portray themselves how they wish. Illustration is a whole different thing, as fictional characters / drawings cannot really consent, so it's up to the artist to portray them -  a lot of comic book artists seem to take the chance to hypersexualise women as the main demographic that comics are aimed at is male. Part of this is classic unrealistic proportions and reducing the character to a 2 dimensional object with no reason to be there other than to be a sex symbol or to be killed off to further the plot of the (male) protagonist.

I have always enjoyed Laura Callaghan's work, as it is something that was similar to what I wanted to do at one point, I just like drawing a lot of women. There is definitely some sexual representations of women within Callaghan's work which leads me to think - how is it that they are not hypersexual? Is it because the artist is female? The intent and context of the work?


http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/blog/independent-laura-callaghans-illustrated-women

 'Callaghan’s scenes lend the females she draws power, conviction, and notoriety. The characters are not to be taken lightly, they very much command attention, through their clothing, hair color, and settings'  (Espolón, The Creators Project, Independent: Laura Callaghan's Illustrated Women, 2015)

This quote basically answered my questions. The women in Callaghan's work don't meld into a mass of similar looking butts and boobs, only identifiable by costume. Each character appears to have a distinct style and attitude that is communicated even by a single image. 

Presentation Boards

I know I haven't done as much  practical work as I should have as I have been focusing mainly on the essay, but now I have more of a solid idea of what I'm doing as I had been kind of lost with my practical work it's just a case of trying things.

In the style of intervention art I am going to take a lads mag such as 'Zoo' and add weird bits to pages and slip them into the magazine, these edited pages would have to match the aesthetic of the magazine itself so I'm also going to attempt to do an illustrated style one (or some images) so see what will work best.

I was sick and missed the crit today though I am well aware that I have not done much more practical work from the last crit, a failure to manage my time well on my part. I intend to try and get some feedback from my peers and work consistently on my practical work in the next two weeks so I have a substantial amount of work before the christmas break.

GIF Test

I thought making some horrifying gifs would be fun, as I'm thinking of basing my practical work around the 'lads mag' but making it start off normal and get increasingly weirder throughout until there's just abominations.

I'm really enjoying using the motif of eyes as it has connotations of the gaze, and turning the eye back on the viewer rather than the viewed, a whole "she looks back" kind of thing. This was just a test but, so I will develop this, and make more (the more horrifying the better right?)

I traced the woman from a 'ZOO' image, for that extra authenticity. Need to play more so my style is applied rather than a straight up tracing. Also timing of movements etc and refinements, could be an interesting series.

Andrea Mary Marshall - Feminist Calendar

http://www.andreamarymarshall.com/thefeminist2016/

 Andrea Mary Marshall created a feminist 'pin up' calendar based on the Pirelli calendar which tends to show women in an overly sexual manner - intended to be looked at by men

"The women are almost always nearly (or totally) naked, and they are styled to embody a variety of conventionally "sexy" traits: pursed lips, flowing hair, arched back, heavy eyelids.

To engage the calendar in a more feminist lens, Marshall created her own calendar using photos of herself. For each month of 2016, Marshall is shown in two juxtaposing images: one of her in a conventionally "sexy" pose, and one with her more vulnerable and barefaced" (Rachel Lubitz, Mic.com)

"That idea of ownership is crucial for Marshall. Rather than having her image taken by someone else, Marshall's pictures have her fully in control — modeling, planning the shots and taking them herself with a timed shutter. And in that sense, Marshall is creating a feminist space where a woman is exposing herself on her own terms and, equally as powerful, showing herself in a minimalist light, stripped of "sexy" convention."

https://mic.com/articles/126758/andrea-marshalls-feminist-calendar-puts-a-new-spin-on-pirelli#.ZJ0in7PzU

As the work of this artist responds to the Pirelli Calendar - a product generally marketed for a male audience, by mimicking the visual language through the more 'sexual' or 'glamorous' self portraits and juxtaposing it with a 'barefaced' image she subverts the gaze.

Like a lot of feminist art I saw at the "feminist avant garde" exhibition this work sort of plays on the presentation of women in the media as either a 'virgin' or a 'whore', boiling women down to these roles rather than accepting the fact that women are multi-faceted beings with more than two settings.

She also brings up some points that I am interested in about intent of the author and how that influences the work and the viewers perception of the work. Work generally needs to come with a context, does work lose it's meaning when the context is not included?

Polly Nor

I was trawling the net for some illustrative work, as a lot of what I have been researching so far has been mostly in the realms of 70's performance art, I'm interested in how female sexuality can be portrayed well through illustration as obviously a fictional woman doesn't have any power to consent like a real woman does.

I found these kooky illustrations by Polly Nor which show more of a female view of sexuality. Subjects usually considered taboo such as female masturbation are addressed through her work. She makes her work to be relatable to other girls, not for men to get off to, and likes it when girls see her work and respond "same".

She said: I also think the changing relationship people have with sex and images of sex is really interesting. Kids are learning how to be sexual from an industry that is created almost entirely by men, for male pleasure alone. Through this very warped representation of sex and relationships, young girls are being taught that they are submissive, sexual objects for men to leer over, use and control, and led to believe that their value lies wholly in how sexy they are. But then, to make things even more confusing, our society also teaches females that being too sexual is shameful and vulgar. We should look available, but not too easy; we should be flirty, but not too forward; we should have sex, but not with too many people and so on. I'm interested in discussing and reacting to these conflicting pressures from a female perspective for a young female audience.

Which really highlights why representations of women vary in lots of different media, even illustration. Comic book art can be pretty problematic when it comes to representing women, with unrealistic body proportions and reducing female characters to 2D objects. How can illustration show a woman exercising choice, I think a lot of this comes from the intent of the author as these are clearly meant for women to identify with naturally rather than something a woman aspires to be like. 

http://www.coolhunting.com/culture/interview-artist-polly-nor

Annie Sprinkle - My Conversation With An Anti Porn Feminist

"We are two women from different worlds with very different experiences. I, Annie, have performed in, directed and produced pornography for twenty five years. Mae Tyme has been anti-pornography for equally as long. We met at a lesbian video night several years ago. You might think that we’d be enemies, because we have such different viewpoints. Could we come together to record a conversation, share our ideas, and show that women of desparate backgrounds and beliefs can communicate and collaborate?" 

"To see a fantastic stripper is an awe inspiring experience. It is to witness the Divine Feminine. It is prayer. And what often surrounds erotic dancers? Drunk, cigarette smoking, disrespectful, bad mannered guys waving measly dollar bills…"

http://anniesprinkle.org/my-conversation-with-an-anti-porn-feminist/

Reading this conversation was pretty interesting as I knew there were opposing views on pornography and sex with men within feminist circles. Personally I come from a sex-positive brand of feminism, and porn really depends on how it's made and who's making it etc etc.

"AS

To me pornography is any photo, film or drawing that shows hard-core explicit sex. How exactly do you view pornography?

MT

As something that is overwhelmingly by, about and for men. It is a world wide industry that generates gazillions of dollars every year from which women do not benefit.

AS

In porn films female performers get paid a whole heck of a lot more than the male performers.

MT

I didn’t know that. I’ve always viewed pornography as an aspect of oppression of women, not of our liberation. And I view the nuclear family pretty much that too. So I’ve tried to develop a sexuality that isn’t about men or what they want, but is entirely about women and how we relate to each other."

There's different views about what porn is and who it's aimed at etc. 

Annie Sprinkle

Annie Sprinkle really intrigues me. She started off as a porn star as she was interested in sex and wanted to learn everything about sex, she then moved on to making art. Pretty explicit art.

In the performance piece 'Public Cervix Announcement' Sprinkle sits with a speculum in her vagina and invites the audience to look at her cervix, while shining a flashlight into her to see.

She herself says that she did not intend to subvert the gaze by demystifying the female body, but to educate a - mostly male - populace about the vagina and cervix. (and to assure them there weren't any teeth inside it)

I found the whole concept of this performance pretty cool, even though it wasn't her intention to it definitely subverted the male gaze as I found that some men were reluctant to look even though they were invited to.

This performance and the act 'Post Porn Modernist' contain acts that given a different means of production and distribution are not dissimilar from porn. Through most artists and themes I have researched I'm finding a running theme of intent and context.



http://anniesprinkle.org/a-public-cervix-anouncement/

Case Studies

I've been kind of struggling with what to use as my case study options, as I feel like there's so much and I'm not sure how similar all three should be.

In my tutorial with Richard I clarified that I would use Burlesque as one of my case studies, which is exciting as I kind of thought I wouldn't be able to use it as a case study. I need to do more research on this as I would like to find a particular practitioner to focus in on. I have a few friends in the burlesque scene so I may be able to use them or they could put me in contact with an appropriate performer.

The issuu document shows the other artists that I have been looking at including some modern work as I keep wondering about how sexual agency can be communicated through illustration, as it's more complex than through performance or photography where the artist is the subject.

I feel as if I can touch on a few of the pieces I've been looking at without going into too much depth on them, and then really going to town on a particular piece or practitioner.

Pin Up art / origins

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/pin-up-girl-history_n_6077082.html

"She’s risqué but never explicit. She’s flirtatious but fiercely independent. She’s erotic but always safe for work, a welcome sight for your teenage cousin and prudish mother alike. She’s the pin-up girl, an all natural American sweetheart created to win the adoration of men across the country"

By Peter Driben, via Taschen Books

"Soon the erotic tactics employed for war advertising were extended to all advertising, as first actualized by Madison Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s."

The pin up was used in war propaganda and advertising - on the sides of planes, keeping up morale for the lads and all that. 

EYE MOTIFS

In my work I have been using a lot of eye motifs - as this links to the fact that women are not percieved as seers, they are there to be seen. By drawing focus to the eyes, or using eyes in a way that is totally uncomfortable and disruptive it reflects the gaze back onto the viewer, rather than allowing the viewer to scrutinise the subject.

These quotes from "The Explicit Body In Performance" by Rebecca Schneider address sight as it is featured in media, and how artists (particularly female ones) have realised this and been able to subvert the male gaze and present themselves as a sexual subject within their own work.

"if "seeing through" is the etymological root of perspective then seeing back through implies a mostmodern turn on that perspectivalism, a doubling back over uniocular vision, so see, " p.126

By using eyes in unfamiliar places, sometimes subtle sometimes not it gives the implication of the image looking back in a more active manner than is expected of a drawing / photogaph / image of a woman.

"redressing a space structured to render being seen and being blind identical, to render bearing vision and being dislocated (invisible to the seen) synonymous" p.126

"In making her split explicit for purposes of explication, the explicit body performer invokes her historic delimination at the same time that she attempts to redress it as "seer", showing the show.  p.126/7

I have put the artist, Penny Slinger on my blog previously but I found what she said incredibly relevent to my work.

This piece "`Consider the Lillies" and "ICU, Eye Sea U, I see you" both use an eye to cover the artists genitalia, disrupting the flow of what could otherwise be a fairly standard photograph. The eye is led there as well as it's the most densely packed area of the image. The series of pieces that this comes from goes through the different 'stereotypes' that women are held under (virgin, wife, mother, lover etc)

"By putting myself in the position of both the viewer and the viewed, I confounded the old subject-object dynamic and became the subject of my own art, my own sexual identity, not just an effect, not objectified through the eye of the male perceiver" " Page.43

I'm unsure how something like this translates through illustration but it is the feeling of imbuing the work with sexual agency, or something that does not allow the viewer to be in control. 

Peer Crit 3/11/2016

The feedback I got in this session was really useful. I was kind of struggling with what I wanted to do for my final outcome when other people had seemingly already decided, so I was starting to panic. I had a vague idea of creating a lads mag of totally weird and subversive imagery, which my peers definitely seemed interested in. I thought this would be good as it is a really modern item created for male consumption, much like paintings or pin ups, so it would be relevent for this era.

The group I was in felt that my experimentation with media and subject matter so far had been expressive and definitely linked to my essay, showing that I am knowledgable and confident with my subject matter - however my documentation has been inconsistent, and they're right it has been pretty bad. I've been more focused on trying to research and write so documentation has gotten kind of lost a long the way, I really need to work on it.

Sketchy Doodle Ideas

“beauty that chooses to ignore the fact that women bleed, that they age, give birth, change and die”

-Jacki Willson , Being Gorgeous.

Something really clicked with me about this quote as it brings up the fact that ideal beauty erases real and very natural things about women, all in the name of keeping men comfortable.

Women feel as if they must change completely natural things about themselves and buy into things that will make them look younger, thinner, hiding menstruation as to not scare the fragile men! In chapter two of my essay I touch on this, with the quote: “Veiling implies secrecy. Women’s bodies, and by extension, female attributes cannot be treates as fully public, something dangerous might happen” (Jordanova,L 1989: 17)

This definitely made me want to draw a lot of things that would make men uncomfortable, and address this erasure. 

I always want to address menstruation, as it seems to be something that makes everyone uncomfortable to talk about, see, or think about. It is a natural bodily function and yet is hidden from society to the point we have terms like "time of the month" to avoid saying the dreaded "PERIOD", "MENSTUATION", "BLOOD IS COMING OUT OF A VAGINA". (also the blue liquid in tampon and sanitary towel adverts, does this disguise the fact they're soaking up blood?)

1. LIPSTICK SMUDGES - I read another quote in Jacki Willson's Being Gorgeous that visual pleasure is not necessarily linked to beauty, we are drawn to imperfections in things, so I just wanted to play with smudging and making it imperfect. The lipstick mark could be seen as a flirtacious signifier. It gave some effects.

2. GLITTER PERIOD - This idea was just stuck in my head. I wanted to take things that are 'taboo' to talk about like periods or female body hair and glamorise them. Combining a sense of appeal with the unease of the taboo. This particular experiment was not so fruitful, and would definitely need more thought and refinement to be successful. Though I like the idea of glamour and unease being combined. 

3. PIN UP PERIOD - A couple of sketches thinking again of glamorising the uneasy. concepts for sexy women / pin up style women putting in or taking out tampons. 

4. Judy Chicago's Red Flag

I saw this piece at the Feminist Avant Garde exhibition and was just totally drawn to it. The pulling out of the tampon I thought gives a really phallic suggestion, mixed with the absolutely non-phallic concept of menstruation, it's like double discomfort for a male viewer, I love it. 

Feminist Avant-Garde - 2/11/16

I went all the way down south into that LONDON to go see the exhibition ‘Feminist Avante Garde’ in the hopes that it would help me find/decide on pieces that I could for the ‘case studies’ in my dissertation and also get inspired. The exhibition was all 70’s and 80’s feminist art, and it was roughly divided into four sections; domestic agenda, normative beauty & the limits of the body, sexuality & objectification, and masquerade, parody& self-representation. I found a few pieces that really peaked my interest though I am unsure yet whether they will be relevant to my research project. I enjoyed the exhibition so much that I bought the book of it which has more in depth information about the pieces and the artists, I have had a skim of it and found a great bit of information about one of the images that caught my attention – so I’m pretty chuffed about that as it addressed the subject / object point of my project. 

Penny Slinger, ICU, Eye Sea You, I See You, 1973

"A big part of this was how female sexuality was viewed at that time. Frankly, there was not much understanding that women derived pleasure from sex. It was more seen as something women submitted to for the man 'Close your eyes and think of England'" - (Slinger in schor; psge 43)

"Female sexuality, usually reduced to a purely passive sight and site of exposure, is provided here with agency. As Slinger notes "By putting myself in the position of both the viewer and the viewed, I confounded the old subject-object dynamic and became the subject of my own art, my own sexual identity, not just an effect, not objectified through the eye of the male perceiver" " Page.43

I have been able to find out about a lot of artists and view their works and it was a really exciting exhibition for me to be able to go see. There were a few pieces of work that I enjoyed and I thought were relevent to my project but not as a case study.  Below is Martha Wilson's Breast Forms Permutated, 1972. The writing suggests that there are different ways breasts develop and the 'perfect' breast would be the middle image. This relates to my project as it suggests what is ideal beauty, while also showing other forms which are natural, commenting on ideals vs reality.

I don’t want to use all 70’s feminist art as examples, I would like to include some modern stuff but I’m also not really sure where to look for this. Should I include a burlesque act as a case study? Or just mention it in relation to the rest of the projects? I’d like to include a piece of ‘traditional’ modern illustration to try and explore whether female sexuality can be explored through illustration.

Gypsy Rose

The Psychology of a Stripteaser

This performance by Gypsy Rose Lee is fun as it is not a modern example of burlesque but absolutely shows a defiance of the thought that a striptease act was strictly for the male gaze

there is a level of humour and awareness to the act, the way she lists off what the striptease artist thinks of. 

This is relevent to the exploration of burlesque within my essay and how it can be viewed as a feminist thing.